Monitoring internet?

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Mekanic01

Gawd
Joined
Jul 11, 2002
Messages
925
I have a question for some of the gurus out there. My wife works at home for a large company. This company used to provide the internet connection for their work at home employees, until they found out that they could save a ton of money buy switching to Geico, er, making the employees provide their own internet.

A few things about this concern me. First, I had her complete a speed test from her work pc, while I performed the test on my personal pc. Using IE, her's was automatically routed through the company's home office, nowhere near where we are at. While mine did not. The results I got from the speed test were roughly 14Mbps on her work comp, 16Mbps on my personal comp. Both are hardwire, not WiFi. Her comp does have an Aruba router in between the pc and the main home router.

Next, the company has always monitored the internet that the employees used, websites, etc. Can they monitor anything on my network, other than her work pc? Can they see what I do on my own computer, iPad, laptop, etc? Or my daughter's even?
 
are you connecting through the Aruba, also?

Chances are, either the Aruba or a piece of software on her machine is VPN'ing in to the work network. So only the traffic from her machine, while connected to the VPN, will get routed through there.

Other traffic on your network will not go through the VPN (unless the Aruba is the VPN end-point, any devices connected to the Aruba will go through the VPN tunnel)
 
The Aruba router is likely acting as a VPN client appliance - this eliminates the need for a software client to run on the laptop. You can verify this by finding out your WAN IP address on each system (Google "What is my IP address") - all the systems should be the same except her work system.

As far as monitoring your other network traffic - the device likely isn't going to do anything malicious like ARP poisoning or MAC flooding. Assuming your other devices are working correctly (and aren't hubs) - it should never be able to see non-broadcast traffic from other systems.

It is still an untrusted device. Best practice would suggest putting it on a "Guest" network segment or VLAN off your router to isolate it from the rest of your devices. This is likely overkill and your router may not have this feature.
 
Since you are connecting directly to the ISP router and your wife is connecting through the company issued device then initially i would say that your internet traffic would not be monitored.

In this new world of telecommute there are a lot of details that companies and individuals need to work out. ie
1. can and should the employer monitor your private internet connection?
 
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