How do I vist ATS from work without the sys admin finding out?

Hi--Not really against the rules and regulations as it's not really illegal and only slightly un ethical but even that may not be true.

The question is "How can you visit ATS from work without your sys admin finding out?" Of course an answer to that question is wanted but a deeper question is also implied. How can you be sure that the government is not seeing everything you do on line? Thus bringing us to the next question logically: If you could find away to thwart a company sys admin wouldn't you be on your way to hiding tracks from a secret government agency or worse yet a hacker who is after your personally information or who knows an even worse entity?

Thus what we want to know is:

Can you surf anonymously?
Can you text message without the logs being easily seen--barring a forensic team taking apart your hard drive that is?
Can you communicate to other computers using only the command line or is that just as visable?


Questions questions and more questions.

Thanks in advance for all replies.

Well, me working in IT, and having had sys admin roles...

No, there is no way you can access any sites without the sys admin finding out what sites you are visiting if he wanted to.

Even if you used an proxy to hide where you are going, you will more likely be caught then, because we will definately want to see what you have been doing once we spot the initial anonymous browser pages you have been visiting.

Best thing is to just go ahead and visit ATS, they can't just fire you.

We normally just send out an email to the person if we are not happy with the way they are using their internet.

So browse as you please untill you get that 1st warning

As for any chat programs, you can chat freely on that, there is no way we can see what you are doing...

unless of course your IT admins feel the need to have keyloggers/screen capture software installed on any of your machines.

Take my advice...feel free to browse the net, but do not go onto any dodgy sites while at work, leave that for when you are at home...

IE, don't express your political views while at work, especially in America





[edit on 18-6-2009 by SkitzoFrenic]

I use credithelpme.com or anything from proxy.org while at work. Sure, they can find out without too much effort, but to be honest I don't know all that much about PCs and I find that I still know more than 75% of IT people about how to cover tracks and uncover covered ones. If you don't want to chance it, just don't use ATS at work. Or you can wear a helmet to work, put a sheet over your head and the monitor and pretend you're in China.

As for anything archived (chat and whatnot) if you need help with that at work, there's not much I can tell you as most workplace computers won't allow you to download programs. If it's for home, I use a program called CCleaner (free) for internet things (easier than going through and deleting everything manually) and every now and then PC Optimizer from optimizeyourpc.com (free for 30 days I think, then something like $40 to keep) to wipe logs or even just free space.

I'm not sure if I violated and T&C there (don't think so anyway) but if I did, sorry.

Was curious. I use ATS only at work. I dont have the internet at home and i work nights 12 hour shifts and sit in a room watching heart monitors so i spend a great deal of time on the internet. I dont see the big deal about going to this website. We have websense on the network here that i absofrigginlutely hate! I have had a devil of a time trying to get around it and sometimes i am successful and others i am not. However i dont worry about this site because personally i dont see it as being "Bad". Just curious what kind of company you work for that your worried about hiding your activities here unless your company has a zero tolerance for internet use that is not work related.

Shouldn't you be focusing on working rather than #ing around on the internet? I mean, you are paid to do a job, right? If it's not "against the rules" then I don't even see what you're worried about. There's all types of spy software that could be on your work system. From key loggers to programs that that take print screens of your monitor every few seconds. Obviously, they can remotely access your system too.

Why don't you just invest in a nice cell phone that you can surf the internet with while at work?

I gotta agree with skitzo... He's (She's?) dead on the money. Even if you can get to a proxy site, assuming they haven't already been blocked, they will take an interest in all the redirected traffic.

Most companies I know of have VNC viewer or another program like it that they can watch your screen real time as if they were sitting behind you. Some of those have keylogger abilities. The only way to overcome that would be to text in to some type of code that they wouldn't be able to understand. However that would be problematic as it would look like gibberish to any other ATS readers, who didn't know your code, and would probably get removed for off topic or something.

The only real way to surf at work unmolested would be to make good friends with someone in the IT department and see if they would remove your computer from the monitoring software. However, that would raise eyebrows as well when someone walks by and you are on MySpace, and you get reported. Likely they would turn the monitor back on with no restrictions, see where you go, and then fire you for surfing porn, and fire your friend for deactivating your monitor (log ins are recorded usually)

Now, saying that, there are ways around that too, but most of them by now have been plugged up. For example, you buy a wireless router, and plug it in to your connection at your workstation and then use a wireless card/usb dongle (if they haven't disabled USB on your computer) and then start surfing. Also assuming they haven't disabled the ability to double route, you could go where you wanted to (behind the blocks) They would be able to see where that router was going to, but wouldn't be able to concretely pin it to you because they can't see who connected to the router. BUT they would get you for circumstantial evidence that you had a router connected to your network connection, and then would confiscate your computer and search it to see if/where you went.

You can clean your computers history but that's cursory at best. You could put a program like window washer on it to overwrite your surfing history up to a hundred times which makes it mostly unrecoverable, but most IT policies cover that contingency too by making it against company policy to install any outside software on your machine. FIRED again

The honest to god ONLY ways (as a novice) to surf at work without getting caught would be to
1) Use dial up on your OWN computer like a laptop (Not the work machine)
2) Use 3G on a Laptop
3) Use your cellphone for internet surfing.
4) Find your companies DSL/Cable line and covertly install a wireless router there. Most companies will have a completely unrestricted backup/visitor connection that runs off of cable or DSL as opposed to the main T1, T3 etc connection. Good luck with that one though

It's possible to do, and almost full proof (if people can peek over your shoulder and see your screen then your outta luck). It's not exactly easy to set up (depends on your experience) but you can google it or have someone help you out who knows how to do this:

Basic idea is you use your work computer to start a "Remote Desktop" session to your home computer. This fuctionality is built into Windows XP.

Once you start the remote session, you can do what ever you want on your home computer and the sys admin can't see what you are doing or where you are surfing, because you are surfing the internet from your home computer.

But like I said, configuring your home's router to connect you to your home's PC is a little technical, but it's 100% possible and "silent" to your sys admin. And of course, my proposed solution requires that you have a home PC with Windows XP.

The only way you'd get caught is if the sys admin walks up behind you at work at sees you are on ATS using your home computer via Remote Desktop.:

reply to post by harrytuttle


See? That's what I meant by as a novice. The good thing about this method is that you are connecting to your computer and all the info is stored on THAT computer. Now they will eventually connect the dots and realize your connecting to 1 IP address, so you would have to have dynamic IP from your provider (Most are) however, to connect with that you have to know what your computers IP address is at all times, even when it changes, there's programs that do that, yada yada yada.

Gets too technical for a novice. HOWEVER, Still if the company has VNC or something like it, they will still see everything you do as if they were standing behind you.

Good idea though!

well.. just buy a cheap ASUS laptop, one of those with a 8'' screen. Then get some mobile internet with that ! this is the ONLY way to not attract attention on your IT team. Or, you have to crack all their network - like taking control over server, delete your own tracks, change policies on the server etc - but this is not at hand for everyone - and in some countru could lead to prison lol

reply to post by fizzy1


Right-on Fizzy!
Don't be discouraged; if CEOs can squander billions whilst adding no real value to companies, I don't see the harm in a little ATS.
Fight the power-and boredom.

I used to surf the net at work, and from experience it helps if your IT guy is a complete moron. While he could have checked the server logs at any time to keep track of our activity... he never did. From the server, they can white-list your network card's MAC Address - so that you can only visit approved sites (company sites) or other machines on the local networks.

We were never caught until the first shift supervisor came in one night late and busted us in the act, and it was his prompting that alerted our IT to our activities. However he never took any precautions on the server end of things. Instead, his solution to keep us off the internet was to delete the Internet Explorer executable from the desktop/startbar/windows directory.

Nice try... but, ever since Windows 98 came out, I.E. has been merged with the OS to try to beat anti-trust lawsuits. Pop open My Computer, Type in a web address in the navigation bar - and Hello Internet.

This worked for awhile until third shift lead was looking up prons and infected the company network with an "STD". Tsk, Tsk. So his solution was.... *Drumroll*.... Client Side software via Net Nanny or some other such program. We had his password cracked inside of 15 minutes. "ITSTEVE" is NOT A SECURE PASSWORD. Especially since it was his login as well. From there it's a simple process.

Remove Whitelist, Clean the history, Clean Browser History, Clean Download History, Clear Cache, Remove any program errors/flags from the administrative tools, saved passwords off, etc. Before we did anything though, we'd set the PC's clock to around 2 A.M... so if we missed anything, it'd be timestamped to third shift. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Any files we downloaded and stored on the company computer were flagged as hidden so they wouldn't pop up on a search - and our secret folder was about 6 layers into the Windows directory with a similar format name to other hidden folders which also occupied the parent folder. I don't remember what all else we did... but we had those systems owned.

And just for spite, before leaving one night 3rd shift wasn't coming in, we took a picture of the desktop with the ArtiosCAD software running, moved the taskbar to the far side of the screen and hid it, removed all the icons and placed them in an off-desktop folder, removed the "My Computer" icon, and applied that previous screenshot of the desktop as the background wallpaper. We then remapped the keyboards so the shortcuts wouldn't work, and changed the language format to Georgian or some such.

The system was down for a week and eventually just decided it was time to upgrade some of the companies hardware. Well.. we were supposed to get new systems anyhow. When the shipment came in, he apparently "lost" a skid of 16 systems and decided to give us our old machines back, with a fresh new install of XP.

The only new PC we got was the one he bought for the new Kongsberg machine we had recently purchased. Unfortunately, it required a PCI hardware card key installed to lock you out of the system if you didn't have the properly licensed proprietary software... and of course, the new computer he got just for it had the thin tower. I.E.... it wouldn't fit. So the new machine itself was down for an additional week while he figured out that he can swap machines between workstations.

reply to post by Lasheic



Yea, I love dumb IT guys. I've owned a couple of networks myself due to incompetence.

The place I work now, has some sharp cats at the wheel, simple tricks don't work with them so I don't even try...I get paid well and it isn't worth it.

They went and blocked youtube, all kinds of news stuff, in fact EVERYTHING I surfed during a night EXCEPT you guessed it, ATS. I just cant see the videos, or link out to certain sites...

My guess is, one of the IT folks is a fellow ATSer but I'm not bringing it up

use remote access frm your boss's portal

Thanks for the replies! Much appreciated and much to digest. My only other question is. If microsoft messenger is already installed on the computer. Then running it shouldn't be a problem. Can they monitor the chat sessions if they aren't actually seeing a screen shot? Is there a log file in windows somewhere that logs your chat sessions for the day. Can that be easily found and erased? Thanks!

The question you have to ask yourself is.

Is ATS worth your job?

True they can't fire you for surfing the internet. They can however fire you if they feel that since you have the time to surf the net then that means the workload isn't enough to justify keeping you.

The sad fact of the matter is that most of the IT people in charge of your internet access could care less what you're doing online. For all you know, they visit ATS on a daily basis. I made friends with the IT guy in this place a few years ago and he just gave me a heads up when they were going to "randomly" turn the monitors on. The last place I worked, I was the IT guy so I was able to spend hours a day on ATS. Where I work now, I'm only in the office 3 days a week, I use my own computer, and since I'm a Search Engine Marketer, I'm allowed to go to any site I want. =) Life gets better!

Sorry, post deleted.

I really should have read the thread before posting.

I had the same Remote Desktop idea.


[edit on 23-6-2009 by 0nce 0nce]

Dont know if it was mentioned, but...
Scan for some some open wireless networks (not your companies) and use those.

reply to post by amazing


My company pretty much blocks all websites that are not related to the work we do and I am all for it (then again, I work in the HR dept so my opinion may be a little biased). I don't care if you work in the mailroom or you are the VP of whatever....your employer pays you to focus on your job and not to spend time on ATS or any other site. Is it really asking too much?

Ok here are some ideas;

1: Get a cellphone that has an internet connection and browser, and visit m.abovetopsecret.com...

2: Get a cellphone that you can plug into your computer and use as a wireless modem, completely bypassing your work network. (you will have to clean history and cookies from work computer). My LG Dare phone does this, it uses it's 3G connection like a modem.

3: Pay for a wireless access service that gives you a USB device that you can plug into your work computer, completely bypassing your work network. Example: b2b.vzw.com...

Basically, you can still use your work computer but you will disable your work network, and use your own wireless network. There are services that allow you to connect to the internet from anywhere. You will still have to clean your computer of any traces, but at least the IT guys wont see your traffic.