Bindun...
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Yup, us IT admins have access to everything on the network. And I mean *everything*.

Now one place I worked actually had an Internet Security Officer. His job was to check the logs of the firewall (one of the first versions of Checkpoint if anyone’s interested) and then to come around to your desk and ask you why you were on a particular site.

The thing was though that the guy was a dickhead. A non-technical dickhead. All he knew IT-wise was how to download the logs from the Checkpoint server and even that had been set up for him by a techy. So, in my first week working there as an Uber-Geek, this guy turned up at my desk and introduced himself by saying.

"Hi, I'm the Internet Security Officer and I want to know what you were doing accessing the site www.lottery.co.uk on Thursday morning at 7.05am?"

WTF? So I looked at this beanpole and said:

"Checking my fucking lottery tickets. What do you think I was doing?"

So he went into his spiel about how the Internet wasn't for personal use and I could only use it for work purposes blah blah blah. I let him finish and told him to go and annoy someone else as I was busy. He gave me a look that clearly said:

"I've got you marked and I'm going to drop you in the shit as soon as I can."

And off he beetled.

So, acting on the premise that the best defence is a good offence, I looked up his username, located his workstation and logged on remotely as local admin. Found his cache directory, cookies etc etc and downloaded them onto my machine. Then I ran a couple of sorting programs and looked at the results. And smiled.

A few days later, dickhead scuttles up to my desk again and asks, with an oily smile:

"Why were you accessing Hotmail, B3ta, Deja-News and the BBC website? I'm afraid that, as I've already warned you previously, I'm going to have to report you to the IT director and disciplinary action *will* be taken"

Then stood there bouncing on his toes waiting to see me crumble and beg him not to report me. I smiled at him.

"OK. Let's go up and see him together shall we? But before we go, I just want to ask you why *you* were accessing the following websites. And why you spent so much time on them. I mean this one - you spent 4 hours in the chatroom on Monday."

And I clicked on a link and brought up his last 6 months of web usage.

www.trannychat.com
www.gaydar.com
www.scat.com

And so on. ( I can't actually remember exactly the real names of the sites, just that they were all hard-core Gay and transvestite sites.)

He went white.

"Err. I was on those sites as part of my job. I have to check out the sites that appear in the logs to make sure that they're not work related before I take action."

"Really? I mean you have to check these sites *every single day*? Just in case they've changed in the last 24 hours? But, that being the case, perhaps you'd like to explain these chat logs as well?"

And showed him fragments of his online chats. And pretty explicit they were too. Well, more brutal than explicit. Well, with that he caved in. After a little more talking by me he agreed that he wouldn't bother me, or indeed the rest of the IT department about what and where we went on the Internet. And, just to make sure, I put myself and the rest of IT in the exception list on the firewall so that none of our future Net usage was logged.

So you see people. I've said this before but never, ever, piss off a techy. We know where the bodies are buried.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Mon 1 Oct 2007, 3:47, Reply)