Thursday, March 16, 2023

How To Monitor VPN User Activity

Don't Miss

Understanding Dead Peer Detection

VPN Monitoring: Troubleshooting End-user Experience Proactively

Dead peer detection is a method that network devices useto verify the current existence and availability of other peer devices.

You can use DPD as an alternative to VPN monitoring. VPN monitoringapplies to an individual IPsec VPN, while DPD is configured only inan individual IKE gateway context.

A device performs DPD verification by sending encrypted IKEPhase 1 notification payloads to a peer and waitingfor DPD acknowledgments from the peer. Thedevice sends an R-U-THERE message only if it has not received anytraffic from the peer during a specified DPD interval. If the devicereceives an R-U-THERE-ACK message from the peer during this interval,it considers the peer alive. If the device receives traffic on thetunnel from the peer, it resets its R-U-THERE message counter forthat tunnel, thus starting a new interval. If the device does notreceive an R-U-THERE-ACK message during the interval, it considersthe peer dead. When the device changes the status of a peer deviceto be dead, the device removes the Phase 1 security association and all Phase 2 SAs for that peer.

The following DPD modes are supported on the SRX Series devices:

DPD timers are active as soon as the Phase 1 SA is established.The DPD behavior is the same for both IKEv1 and IKEv2 protocols.

You can configure the following DPD parameters:

Note the following considerations before configuring DPD:

How To Reach Maximum Anonymity With A VPN

So, what makes a VPN really anonymous? VPNs apply different levels of encryption, but the strongest is generally believed to be the AES-256-CBC encryption. Additionally, VPNs utilize several methods for keeping your information totally anonymous including:

If the IP address you use cannot be connected back to you, then no one can trace any activity back to you either. Anonymous VPNs use multiple IP addresses to avoid tagging you to a specific address and giving you a clear identity.

Disposable Email Addresses. Disposable email addresses keep your identity safe by tagging it to a temporary name and identifying marker. Services that let you sign up with this type of email address are keeping your identity safer since the email address is not linked to you and cant be traced back to you.

Chaining VPNs. By routing your information through multiple VPN servers, you lose the direct connection that links you to the activity in question. Much like a TOR , chaining or double-hop VPNs can throw a tracker off your scent.

No Logs. A company that keeps logs of your internet activity or traffic is essentially storing your private information. This can hardly be considered anonymous, so the first and most basic criteria would be no logs. Some VPN services claim that they delete the information frequently enough so that nobody can access it or trace it back to you, but the logs still exist, so your information is not totally private.

Set Up Monitoring Policies

Every employee is responsible for ensuring the security of your infrastructure and data. Ensure you communicate security policies at onboarding and keep these policies up-to-date. Consider requiring a yearly read and sign-off acknowledgement of the policy by all employees.

Discuss the very real consequences of a breach and how it impacts employees. On a micro-level, breaches result in lost work and cause rework for the employee. At a macro-level, breaches impact corporate reputation and profitability.

Develop and share clear policies about why and when monitoring is being used and how data is used. You may want to discuss how PC monitoring software will be used to protect corporate assets.

Step 3

You May Like: Why Use VPN For Streaming

How Pervasive Is The Tracking

According to one recent investigation, of the 115 most popular VPN services, 26 collect information that could be personal and/or identify you. These include your IP address, bandwidth data, location, and connection timestamps.;

The same study found that only 9% of the logs contained the websites users visited, and that over 90% had payment info. It also stated that a quarter of the logs contained IP addresses and nearly a third of the logs included users personal details.;

Recognizable Name Not Ambiguous Domain Name

How to Use Activity Monitor to Speed up Your Mac
  • Exclusive product feature that rolls up unclear domain activity into a friendly name.
  • Todays complex Websites utilize many different domains just to load a single page.
  • Firewall top domain reports for these types of sites do not provide the full picture.
  • Managers want time online by Website name, not by ambiguous Domain Name.

Recommended Reading: What VPN Works With Prime Video

How To Audit User Activity With Remote Desktop Monitoring Software

Use CurrentWares remote desktop monitoring software to audit logons, internet activity, application usage, and USB activities of your remote users.

Remote desktop solutions are becoming increasingly common with the prevalence of distributed workforces. With employees working from home now more than ever your organization needs to ensure that remote desktop activities are monitored for security, productivity, and compliance purposes.;

In this article you will learn how to use CurrentWares remote PC monitoring software solutions to audit the activity of users that are using remote desktop, virtual machines, Citrix, and other Windows-based remote access and virtualization technologies.;

Want to learn more about monitoring user activity in a Citrix environment? Check out this article on Citrix user activity monitoring with CurrentWare

Finding The Best VPN For No Logs

For those concerned about privacy and internet freedom, a VPN is only as good as its logging policy. For this reason, a no logs VPN should be at the top of your priorities.;

When youre shopping for a VPN, pay attention to the providers no logging policy. You can usually find this information on their website under the sections titled privacy policies or terms of use.;

Pay attention to the language the company uses. Terms such as no-logging or zero-logging usually imply a lack of both connection and usage logs, which is ideal. However, some companies use convoluted language that makes it harder to identify how strict their logging policies are.;

Below are 5 well-established providers who meet some of the criteria outlined in the article above and have been singled out by the larger VPN community as solid choices for anyone looking to evade prying eyes.;

You May Like: What Does Bitdefender VPN Do

Blocking Unwanted Applications: Application Control Not Port Control

Senior IT Managers, engineers and administrators surely remember the days where controlling TCP/UDP ports at the Firewall level was enough to block or provide applications access to the internet. For some years now, this is no longer a valid way of application control, as most unwanted applications can smartly use common ports such as HTTP or HTTPS to circumvent security policies, passing inspection and freely accessing the internet.

In order to effectively block unwanted applications, businesses must realize that it is necessary to have a security Gateway device that can correctly identify the applications requesting access to the internet, regardless the port they are trying to use aka Application Control.

Application Control is a sophisticated technique that requires upper layer inspection of data packets as they flow through the gateway or proxy, e.g. GFI WebMonitor. The gateway/proxy executes deep packet level inspection to identify the application requesting access to the internet.

In order to correctly identify the application the gateway must be aware of it, which means it has to be listed in its local database.

Adding Custom Performance Counters

How to Monitor All User Logns in a Domain using Native Tools

You can add custom performance counters while adding a device template or by;editing a device template .;

You can also do this;by navigating to the device’s dashboard.;To do this:

  • Go to;Network>;Network;Devices.
  • Click the;name of the device.
  • Go to the;Performance Counters;tab.
  • Click;Add Performance Counters.
  • In the;Add Performance Counters;pop-up, click;Add Custom Performance Counters;in the bottom-right corner.
  • This will direct you to the;Edit Device Templates;window.
  • You can add your custom performance counters here by entering the SNMP OID, name, description, and unit.
  • Save your changes. Click Save and Associate if you wish to associate this device template containing new performance counters, to a set of network devices.
  • Here is a video to demonstrate performance counters:

    Also Check: How To Change VPN To Another Country Free

    How To Detect Superman VPN User

    Employees of corporate firms work in offices and on the field in geographically different places. It is very difficult for these locations and staff to connect to the headquarters from point to point due to costs and infrastructure problems. In these cases, the offices and staff need to securely connect to the headquarters. In order to meet this need, virtual private networks that cryptically carry the outgoing data towards the Internet were developed. VPN connections can be conducted between two locations or with the VPN software installed on the staff computer. As a result of the increased managerial costs due to the VPN software installed on the computer, web- based VPN solutions were created. Illegally exploiting these accesses is possible by obtaining the user access information. Illegal VPN access uses point at the fact that the user broke the speed obstacle and was able to access sources in far away places in a very short time period.

    VPN Log Monitoring With Huawei Firewall

    EventLog Analyzer comes with out-of-the-box VPN reports that gets generated;based on the VPN;logs from Huawei firewall devices. The successful and failed VPN logon trend reports help;identify;anomalous activities, and patterns of successful;and failed logon attempts over time.

    Available reports

    Successful VPN Logons |;Top Successful VPN Logons based on Remote Devices |;Top Successful VPN Logons by Users |;Successful VPN Logon Trends

    You May Like: How To Setup VPN On Spectrum Router

    Web Filters Time Limits And Apps

    At the very least, a good parental control tool features content filteringthe ability to block access to websites matching categories such as hate, violence, and porn. This type of filtering only really works if it’s browser-independent and works with secure sites. With no HTTPS filtering, a smart teen could bypass the system using a secure anonymizing proxy website or even an uncommon web browser in some cases. Using a VPN or the Tor browser often breaks even the strongest protections, too. Most also have the option to permanently enable SafeSearch, though those settings are often limited to Google, Bing, and sometimes YouTube. Your child can thwart most SafeSearch restrictions by using a privacy-focused search engine such as DuckDuckGo. Of course, the most capable solutions also keep a detailed log of your child’s web activity.

    Access scheduling is another very common feature. Some services let parents set a daily or weekly schedule for device usage. Others specifically restrict the amount of time your kid spends on the internet. Qustodio lets you set time restrictions on individual mobile and desktop apps. This is particularly useful for children who have a habit of playing games or using social media apps when they should be doing homework. The most helpful time-based settings apply to all your kids’ devices, so they just can’t switch between them to evade limits.

    How Can I Measure Employee Productivity

    Monitor User Activity on Terminal Server with SysKit ...

    Through Teraminds comprehensive dashboards and employee analytics, employers are given invaluable insight into productivity and daily workloads. Custom guidelines can be set to determine what employees spend most of their time doing, including what applications are being used, how many emails are being send, what types of websites are being visited, and much more.

    Teramind provides the flexibility to evaluate entire departments or single employees on demand, with in-depth information to help make informed decisions about your workforce.

    Don’t Miss: How To Use Norton 360 VPN

    How Employee Monitoring Software Can Help Improve Productivity

    The team is the main driving force behind your organization. For that reason, you need to track team members and support them to improve their productivity levels.

    You can even move workers to areas where they are more comfortable so that they can be more productive. Also, watching worker activities on a daily basis can help you guide the team to reach its full potential.

    Your company requires all workers to perform their tasks as productive as possible.Surveilling your workers is one of the ways that can help improve productivity in your business; however, you have to do it correctly, not to make them uncomfortable.

    The best way to monitor your team is by installing employee monitoring software. The application comes with a dozen benefits. Team productivity improvement is the most crucial benefit that you will get.

    It is all about data, facts, and results. Employers need a useful tool to measure how a team or individuals perform.

    Performance tracking gives employers a chance to find talented individuals in the company and use their potential. The tool is also useful for workers since they don’t need to worry about being paid less or getting fired unfairly. Employees can simply prove how many hours they spent working.

    On the other hand, employers can find which team members don’t perform well and help them achieve better results.

    To following few sentences will help you understand why such surveillance is beneficial.

    How VPNs Help Protect Your Privacy & Anonymity

    VPNs cloak your information on the internet the same way a firewall does on your computer. The type of encryption algorithms and connections used will determine the extent of anonymity being provided. While the details of the technology can be more than the average person would understand, a simple explanation of how a VPN works can be displayed with the following analogy. Imagine you are traveling through a tunnel. Whatever goes through the tunnel cannot be seen by the outside world. The VPN is the tunnel, and your private information is you traveling through that tunnel. Once information goes in, nobody can see it. The added bonus is that with a VPN, nobody knows who sent the information either, keeping you anonymous.

    Additionally, VPN services use several means of encryption and cloaking to hide your data from prying eyes. When the information is encoded, only someone with the code can read the data, so even if it would be intercepted somehow, it would all be gibberish anyway. The exact methods are discussed below, but here are a few situations where a VPN helps protect your privacy:

    Read Also: How Does Pia VPN Work

    How To Monitor User Activity On Network

    User activity monitoring can be performed using log analysis. Firewall logs help reveal information about infiltration attempts at the perimeter of a network, and on the nature of traffic coming in and going out of the firewall; this means security administrators can monitor user level security threats and traffic usage by optimally analysing the firewall logs. Security administrators need to also set user specific alarms by setting traffic and bandwidth triggers, this is helpful in identifying anomalous activities in the network

    What Network Monitoring Systems Do

    AWS Knowledge Center Videos: How do I monitor Amazon VPN tunnels using AWS Cloudwatch Alarms?

    Network monitoring systems perform many functions, including the following:

    • examine and analyze network traffic according to preset and user-defined rules;
    • analyze bandwidth by application, protocol and IP address groups;
    • identify network traffic capacity, traffic patterns, overhead, latency and throughput;
    • identify and mitigate devices and applications that use excessive bandwidth;
    • get notified when network usage exceeds set thresholds;
    • identify high-bandwidth users and restrict their activities;
    • detect, diagnose and resolve network performance issues;
    • track response time, availability and uptime of routers, switches and other devices; and
    • display performance data in dashboards and other visual representations.

    In the diagram below, both a remote office and a remote user are using VPNs to connect to a headquarters data center for access to the company’s information resources. The network monitoring system can monitor devices and network traffic at both the data center and remote office. It can also monitor the remote user by examining data traffic over the internet. IP addresses identify each location and remote user and are used by the monitoring system to analyze traffic activity.

    Read Also: How To Buy Games Cheaper With VPN

    Improve Employee And Organizational Safety

    Employee monitoring can help your security and legal team investigate possible criminal activity , investigate thefts and gather evidence. Computer monitoring softwares like Teramind can provide them with detailed alerts for all employees including any security incidents and what actions were taken.

    Warning messages can be configured to inform employees about nonconformity and influence corrective behavior. Instant snapshots, session recordings and history playback features can be used for audit and evidence gathering purposes. The recordings can be handed over to law enforcement as evidence.

    Thats not all. Your HR/legal can build etiquette rules to detect abuse and harassment at the workplace by scanning the communication channels. Important channels like emails, IM and social media can all be scanned and collected.

    Some employee monitoring software which has GPS tracking or mobile phone monitoring can know the whereabouts of its workers. The software can even provide safety support in case of an emergency, especially to fieldworkers in remote/dangerous areas.

    Hotspot Shield: Best VPN For Streaming

    • Compatible with torrenting and Netflix streaming
    • Advanced encryption;

    Another well-established provider within the VPN community, Hotspot Shield is especially favored for its torrent and Netflix streaming capabilities. It operates on a no-logging policy that, while not as clear-cut as Nord, promises no activity logs . Hotspot has also gained major points for using TLS 1.2 with perfect forward secrecy , and 128-bit AES data encryption. Hotspots real bread and butter is with torrenting and streaming, making it a favorite for P2P sharing and Netflix users. ;

    Hotspot ShieldVisit Site

    You May Like: What Type Of VPN Is Expressvpn

    How VPNs Can Help You

    Before you sign up for a VPN service, take a long hard look at the sites frequently asked questions section, as well as the privacy and terms and conditions content on the VPN companys website. This is true even if the site states that it has a no logging policy.;

    Typically on these sections of the website you will see a description of their logging policy and really get to see what the fine print says. You should be able to learn what the logging entails and how long the logs are kept before they are automatically deleted. Companies like ExpressVPN and Hotspot Shield have strict no-logging policies.

    See to what extent you can opt out of any sort of logging and if you can ask for your logs to be deleted.;

    Also, look at where the VPN company is based. Jurisdiction is key because the company will need to adhere to the data retention laws of the country in which it is located. If this country requires strict data retention, this will nullify the no-logging policy of the company.;

    Another principle youll want to adhere to is – you get in what you put in. Dont assume that a free service will be able to provide you with the same level of security and anonymity. After all, if the company isnt charging anything for the service, then there is less of an obligation to protect their customers security. In addition, the fact that its free could indicate that selling or using customer data is a big part of their business model.;

    Previous articleHow To Get VPN On Ps4
    Next articleHow To Cast With VPN

    More articles

    Popular Articles