A question about beating filters at work; Bypassing blocked sites

I know there are proxy servers, but won't my SA, or whoever monitors this stuff, see multiple uses of say, "www.v41.com" and get suspicious? Let's say that's my proxy's address I use to beat the work internet filter and check my yahoo e-mail or abovetopsecret. Will someone get suspicious if they see me accessing "www.v41.com" for 12 hours (how long my shift is)?

How does that work? How do they find people bypassing filters and surfing banned sites? Are they actually looking for proxy sites that people visit, or is there a keyword search SA's do?

It depends on several things. Like whether your network admin (System Administrator) sits behind the Proxy Server and watches the Logs or activity 24/7, or even go through them at all. The reason they put "filters" up or block addresses is because most people (Administrators) don't have time to sit behind a Proxy Server and watch Network traffic all the time.

It also depends on the Proxy Software they use. Some Proxies can easily be by-passed using anonymous proxy servers, while other Proxy Servers are intelligent enough to pick up Addresses in Addresses. (If that made any sense... )

Basically when a specific address is blocked on a Proxy Server, the Proxy watches all traffic and will prevent any blocked address from connecting to the site. Say a filter like this is implemented: "*.microsoft.com", then all addresses with a .microsoft.com will be blocked, including updates.microsoft.com, etc. It depends on the Proxy server whether it will pick up the address in say "http://www.abovetopsecret.com/post.php?redirect=www.microsoft.com"... A good Proxy should pick up the address, while a good Anonymous Proxy Server will not display the target address so that the actual address shows up...

Administrators can do searches on keywords - depending on the type of logs kept by the Proxy server, although most Proxy servers only logs the addresses and the user/IP address that visited the address.

So, in short, I can't say for sure if your ATS or Yahoo browsing will go by undetected by your System Administrators. If you work for a big company with a big amount of Internet users, then your chances of being "caught out" are smaller if you use a anonymous proxy server to browse. One thing is sure, and that is that you are not going through that Proxy Server undetected, unless you bring out the big guns, like some less legal tools and software. But these will get you in trouble, if not fired!

Hope that made any sense.

The filters I am trying to beat are Air Force ones, and I decided against it. The reason being, the proxy uses a secure SSL connection, and I think that would raise flags in the logs of IPs.

It sucks. 12 hours is a long shift. It would of been nice during downtime to check my Yahoo or ATS!