Flutterby™! : Busted!

The office I work in is not for the prudish. Our business is making sculptures of human bodies. Looking at porn on the web can be legitimate research. And we're in San Francisco, so it's not like any topic is off-limits for water cooler discussion.

Thus it was surprising this morning to discuver a shortcut to a porn site on the desktop this morning on one of our test machines; why would anyone be surfing the web out there? Go look at the cookie logs, discover lots of browsing around midnight thirty for the past few nights. Pretty obviously someone on the maintenance staff.

I have generally taken a casual approach to office security; as someone who knows how to circumvent security systems I've always pretty much believed that physical security is security, if someone gets in to the office they can get what they want off my hard drive.

Obviously that's a false assumption. When deleted off the desktop, the shortcut reappears slightly later. AdAware finds nothing. We've held off on the complete forensics on that machine 'til we show it to building management, but it's suddenly obvious that the casual web surfer, one who's not savvy enough to fire up Mozilla rather than IE or willing to run untrusted executables, could cause far more damage than the determined spy. It's time to start locking down the computers. Damn.