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Thread: Monitoring the activities of accounts on Windows

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    Monitoring the activities of accounts on Windows

    Is there any way I can monitor the activity (file access, URLs visited etc) of another user on my Windows machine? Also, if I have files in my personal folders can I be sure they're not accessible by anyone on the same machine without an admin account?

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    YUKIKAZE arthurleung's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by badger
    Is there any way I can monitor the activity (file access, URLs visited etc) of another user on my Windows machine? Also, if I have files in my personal folders can I be sure they're not accessible by anyone on the same machine without an admin account?
    For URL access you can run a small proxy server and force all users to go through it.
    For file access I doubt its any practical. For every webpage the user open he'll be accessing 30+ files and if he/she surfs for an hour you'll probably have 10000 lines to go through.

    If your user don't have admin right and you have the permission setup right they won't be able to access your files.

    IMO if you got important files you either
    1) Encrypt them on the harddrive
    2) Don't let anyone use your computer
    3) Encrypt them (like RARing with password) then put the file onto one (or more) USB flash disk (also serves as backup)
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    Quote Originally Posted by badger
    Also, if I have files in my personal folders can I be sure they're not accessible by anyone on the same machine without an admin account?
    So long as you are using NTFS, the user has explicit ownership of their profile folder and other users are filtered out, even admins.
    For an admin to browse into another user's home folder they would either need to be granted permission by the user or yank ownership.
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    You can audit file accesses and failures in event viewer using a group policy.
    http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=300549 covers it for 2000 but XP isn't too dissimilar.

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    You can monitor URL's visited not on the machine but on the router.

    For the home or small office & assuming you are router admin :

    Some consumer routers have the ability to send logs to an email address.
    Get yourself of those GB free email addresses. and send it to that. You will need need it + lots of time searching through the logs. Every IP connections on your router will be be sent to that email address.

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