Netsiren UC.Lan

It's understandable that many managing directors are worried about wading through a legal quagmire because staff are sending dodgy emails out of the company. Whether intentional or not, the threat is real.

Netsiren's UC.Lan is designed to take the hard work out of monitoring a network by being the network's eyes and ears. It checks out email and website content as it travels though your network without anyone knowing of its existence.

The manufacturer claims that it is superior to filter and blocking tools as it doesn't have these functions, but instead relies on your staff to have a responsible attitude to internet use. It's more of a surveillance camera than a security gate for your network.

Installation was simple. We restarted our test machine when prompted, and after starting up the application we were asked to enter the licensing details, as well as which workstations we wanted to monitor.

One fly in the ointment was that the application prefers Internet Explorer 5.0. This may prove a problem as most companies have progressed to 5.1 and 5.5. The manual reads in big block letters that there are known issues with version 5.5, and version 5.0 is required to review network activity.

Keeping watch
The task of entering the IP addresses that you want to monitor is monotonous if you have a lot of addresses and ports to keep watch on. There is a function called 'Auto-discovery Workstations', but this did not do anything at all, despite the network running without any problems.

The manual revealed that the UC.Lan machine had to be on either the same hub as the internet gateway or be connected via the management port to the switch where the gateway resides. This could pose a few extra problems for the already-hassled network manager.

We configured our test machine to show up on the user interface. Nothing happened at first, but after sending out a few test emails, we saw that the application made a note of where we went and what we did, as well as what we wrote in our emails.

This was all without any idea that anything different had happened at the test machine end. It was quite spooky, and showed the need for users to be responsible when using the internet.

Easy on the eye
The user interface is well laid out and it is easy to look at an individual workstation's usage history. It monitors the main protocols such as FTP, NNTP, POPS, SMTP and HTTP, but doesn't show up activity for Lotus Notes and Exchange.

A status bar provides icons for the most frequently used options, such as loading and saving different profiles and printing reports. An options menu can configure the performance of the application and to add other network nodes. It allows the exclusion of workstations from surveillance, such as your own machine. You can also specify what gets logged by your database.

The user interface shows up all activity from the internet and email. From here it is easy to see all the web pages visited and emails sent and received. It can even check upon any newsgroups visited and threads that have been posted. Deleting records of emails and websites is straightforward, so it is advisable to keep this console secure, away from those wanting to cover their tracks.

Reports can be created, based on virtually any set of criteria from emails sent to web pages visited. You can specify further rules and highlight keywords to look out for within websites and emails. For the managing director's peace of mind, you can monitor any correspondence with your competitors.

It is easy to monitor any number of workstations and the beauty of this software is that no agents have to be installed on any of the other machines. Although users will not be aware that monitoring is going you should tell your staff that you are monitoring their internet and email activity and implement a clear acceptable usage policy beforehand.

Workstations can be grouped in any way, such as departments or of categories, like high-risk users, or temps. These workstations can be duplicated on the interface so, for example, a high-risk user in accounts can be put in two groups for reporting purposes.

Contact Netsiren 020 7423 0400

See also:

At what cost human rights?

Doom-mongers are predicting that the Human Rights Act will cost businesses a fortune in frivolous litigation.  12 Oct 2000

Supplier offers reward for revealing spoof e-mail sender

Software supplier Geac has offered a cash bounty of £25,000 to the staff member who can track down the source of a number of spoof emails, supposedly from management, that clogged up its worldwide intranet and were circulated to hundreds of customers.  10 Oct 2000

BARGAIN HUNTER - Web watchers.

UC2 - an internet monitoring tool from Netsiren allow parents to monitor what their children are viewing online. Installation takes less than a minute and and is completely invisible in operation. However, a single mouse click allows parents to see a list of exactly which sites have been visited with the site address clearly displayed.  21 Feb 2000

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