Because of Pandemic and remote work, User Activity Monitoring and Time-Tracking solutions start being used more intensively by the corporate customers to manage a remote workforce. As a result, the most popular Time-Tracking SaaS solutions may be targeted by Malware, Cybercriminals, or Insider threats. As a response, we would like to announce the end-to-end encryption feature soon will become available for all StaffCounter customers. With “end to end” Encryption enabled, the data will be encrypted by StaffCounter Agents before upload to the staffcounter.net cloud and then decrypted in your web browser right in a moment when you are looking at the reports or employee productivity data. This provides the highest privacy level since data delivered to the cloud storage in encrypted form.  By using this principle employed in our cloud storage, technically we will not be able to read and understand productivity data received from computers by any means, on any level. This will enable safe usage of Employee Monitoring (User Behavior Analysis) solutions in any environment, even with the most strict compliance and security policies and requirements. After this feature will be enabled by the customer, StaffCounter.net or StaffCounter On-premise server will store only encrypted data blocks for each computer or employee.
Further details will be added to this announcement soon.      

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Working from home (WFH) or remote-work has been known only as exceptional practice in the workplace until the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the attitude significantly. From the point of view of employees, remote work is often associated with the perceived increase of job satisfaction, for example by working from any location around the world (freelancers), by having an individual work environment, or by having more trustful relationships inside the company. From the point of view of management, remote employees bring great managerial issues like loss of control. Today top management is still skeptical about remote workers because they question the ability of their staff to handle remote infrastructure, take responsibility for confidential data, solve any situation independently and manage their time or work properly without supervision. But the latest developments in the Surveillance economy bring fresh solutions. Properly selected “Security as a Service” tools (SECaaS or SaaS) are able to cover distributed end-points into a single virtual dashboard, capture new kinds of productivity data, and thus allows better control and decision-making over a remote workforce. 

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Recently StaffCounter had a number of False-Positive cases with different AVs software like Kaspersky, Bitdefender, McAfee, Malwarebytes, Windows Defender, etc. Kaspersky Antivirus (AV) protects your computer from various threats such as viruses, spyware, ransomware, banners, and others. But AV vendors are not supposed to know all existing enterprise monitoring software, so they started to add software behavior patterns as a criterion for detection. For example, keyboard monitoring behavior, screenshots, or screen-reader behavior is now considered as possibly dangerous. Therefore, in some cases, you need to add the StaffCounter program to the list of exceptions. StaffCounter also has an integrated file system filter driver for the DLP component and a big part of networking code for data upload, so by the behavior, it may look like Remote Access Trojan (RAT) but it is not so of course. As a part of transparency, we offer StaffCounter prior versions as open source.

Currently, we are working with each vendor to add a StaffCounter exception for each false-positive case. In this article, we will describe in detail the entire process of adding Staffcounter to the exception list of the Kaspersky Small Office Security 8. But the same principle may work for other AVs. 

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System administrator usually has to protect corporate network from inside and outside threats and block them. To help administrators to deal with it, we created our product – StaffCounter DLP. What can it do? Continue reading article →