Hi there! My new employer gave me some money to buy a work laptop. I went ahead and bought it and the only thing they asked me to install on it was OpenVPN, nothing else.
I’m not required to keep it active all the time, only for very specific tasks. Wondering how much can they monitor on my laptop when it’s connected and when it’s disconnected?
Thanks in advance!
Always assume your employer can see everything on their device and you never have to worry again.
If it’s just OpenVPN and no other monitoring software then they actually don’t care about you at all.
Just make sure they don’t know your password and that they don’t install anything on your laptop.
Anytime you have OpenVPN connected you should assume all your network traffic is monitored.
If your OpenVPN is disconnected and they have not installed any software and they don’t know your password, then you are free and clear to do what you want.
Still I would not recommend watching porn or any illegal streaming just to be safe. But if you wanted to apply to other jobs you can. Just make sure to do everything you want to keep from them in a “private” browser tab. And clear your browser history often. Or set the browser up in such a way that it does not save history or cache.
Everything from keystrokes and mouse movements to your webcam.
Access to any device on your network gives them a lot of tools to look at all of the traffic on your network. I completely segregate my work and home networks.
They can if configured to do it, see every website, page search you visit, do. Only while you are connected to the company open vpn server.
That’s quite lax, they don’t care what you do.
For now.
Keep in mind, it is their laptop and they could demand to analyse it at any time.
Some tinfoil hats round here. Realistically:
Sounds like it’s a small company.
You purchased the computer on their behalf rather then sending you one and they had you do the installation of OpenVPN (likely requires admin rights). And if it’s the standard OpenVPN client, then it’s just vpn.
I’m assuming they did not ask you to join it to a domain
You can Google “how to see my computers domain”
If my assumptions are correct: I’m 99.999999% they can’t see anything if the VPN connection is off.
But it’s his device purchased with their money. Big difference
Anytime you have OpenVPN connected you should assume all your network traffic is monitored.
It’s wrong and not as simple as that. It depends on vpn configuration and network routing. For example, a VPN connection might only get used when accessing particular IP addresses (employer’s network), and the default routing will be used for all other connections.
Private tab, browser history, cache and other tricks you mention are useless too. For a vpn connection, It doesn’t matter if you access some website from a private tab or regular tab.
What do you think the private browser tab does here?
I desolder the microphones…
My new employer gave me some money to buy a work laptop.
I interpret “work laptop” as their laptop. People don’t think about this when accepting hardware from their employer and what constitutes acceptable use, what can they monitor, etc., so like I said I go with “they can see it all.”
Oooooo fancy! What application package? For windows or Mac. Like a .MSI? Or a .exe script?
But it will matter if an IT guy looks through his browser history. And I said safe to assume. Consider the repercussions if you are wrong and this dude is browsing porn all day long. Just assume it’s full tunnel with DNS filtering. It’s a work laptop. Keep it clean.