It’s a fact of life in the 21st-century workplace: The boss
may well be watching his employees, especially if they use a computer. Bosses
are using two types of spying software: network-based programs that monitor all
traffic passing through a system, and programs that sit directly on an
employee’s desktop. Vericept Protect is an example of the first
type. The software searches all correspondence for any indication that employees
are accidentally or maliciously communicating sensitive data, and blocks it.
Vericept also claims it can examine the tone of an e-mail to detect job
dissatisfaction. Someone who sends a message saying "I hate my job." or "You’re
not going to believe what my idiot boss did today." could be poised to upload
company files in anticipation of leaving the job. Vericept makes
products to monitor other Web activities as well. Paul Pilotte, a senior product
manager at the company, says it helped one client fend off a harassment suit
filed by a senior employee who claimed someone had left printouts from an adult
website in her office. The company planned to give her a large severance package
(解雇费) until it used a Vericept tool to examine her Web use. That search found
that the employee had printed the pages herself. On another occasion, Vericept
helped catch a worker who had installed a keylogger on a manager’s computer to
extract the boss’s passwords. One product that monitors an
individual desktop is NetVizor. It can record everything a person types, from
bank passwords to the names of illnesses searched on WebMD. It also logs and
monitors e-mails sent and received, instant message chats, and the names of
documents opened or printed. It can even capture a snapshot of a computer
screen, providing an employer with a replica of what the employee is seeing on
his or her monitor. Kelly Todd, information-services security
analyst for Securities America Financial Corporation, an independent broker
dealer with several hundred employees, won’t say what kind of software his
company uses. But he does say as soon as "somebody types an e-mail and hits
Send, before it even gets to the central e-mail server, it goes through a system
that archives the e-mail". NetVizor can create a copy of what the employee is seeing by catching ______.