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Tech Tips

April 2011: MSWindows - How to detect computer & email monitoring or spying software.

It’s some times essential in a work environment for administrative purposes as well as for security, to monitor computers and emails. Monitoring email, for example, allows you to block attachments that could contain a virus or spyware. It also allows the IT team to connect to a user’s computer to fix a problem.

However, if you feel that you are being monitored when you shouldn’t be, there are a few little tricks you can use to determine if you’re right.

Computer Monitoring

Currently, neither Windows XP nor Windows Vista officially support multiple concurrent connections while someone is logged into the console meaning that if you’re logged into your computer and someone were to connect to it using the BUILT-IN REMOTE DESKTOP feature of Windows, your screen would become locked and it would tell tell you who is connected.

This is useful because it means that in order for someone to connect to YOUR session without you noticing, they have use third-party software and it’s a lot easier to detect third-party software than a normal process in Windows.

So now we’re looking for third-party software, which is usually referred to as remote control software or virtual network computing (VNC) software. First, the easy thing to do is to simply check in your Start Menu → All Programs and check whether or not something like VNC, RealVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC, LogMeIn, GoToMyPC, etc is installed. If any of those programs are installed, then someone can connect to your computer without you knowing it as long as the program is running in the background as a Windows service.

Furthermore, if an installed program is running, there will be an icon for it in the task bar. Check all of your icons (even the hidden ones) and see what is running. If you find something you’ve not heard of, do a quick internet search to see what pops up. It’s usually quite hard to remove something from the taskbar, so if there is something installed to monitor your computer, it should be there.

You can also make use of the Windows built-in Firewall that blocks many of the incoming communication ports for security reasons. In order for these third-party apps to connect to your computer, they must come through a port, which has to be open on your computer. You can check all the open ports by going to Start, Control Panel and Windows Firewall.

Click on the Exceptions tab and you’ll see see a list of programs with check boxes next to them. The ones that are checked are “open” and the unchecked or unlisted ones are “closed”. You can block an unwanted program by un-checking the box for it!

Another way to see if someone is connected to your computer is to see if there are any processes running under a different name! If you go to the Windows Task Manager (press Cntr + Shift + Esc together) and go to the Processes tab, you’ll see a column titled User Name. You should only see your user name, Local Service, Network Service, and System. Anything else means someone is logged into the computer!

Email & Web Site Monitoring

When you send an email from Outlook or some email client on your computer, it has to connect to the email server. Now it can either connect directly or it can connect through what is called a proxy server, which takes a request, alters or checks it, and forwards it on to another server.

If you’re going through a proxy server for email or web browsing, than the web sites you access or the emails you write can be saved and viewed later on. You can check for both and here’s how. For IE, go to Tools, then Internet Options. Click on the Connections tab and choose LAN Settings.

If the Proxy Server box is checked and it has a local IP address with a port number, then that means you’re going through a local server first before it reaches the web server. This means that any web site you visit first goes through another server running some kind of software that either blocks the address or simply logs it.

For your email, you’re checking for the same thing, a local IP address for the POP and SMTP mail servers. To check in Outlook, go to Tools, Email Accounts, and click Change or Properties, and find the values for POP and SMTP server.

If you’re working in a big corporate environment, it’s more than likely that the Internet and email are being monitored. You should always be careful in writing emails or browsing web sites while at the office.

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Summarised by the WOUGNET Techteam from an article posted on Online Tech Tips.

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