Design and development of a desktop monitoring system

Ours is an age of computing power where we have mil- lions of computing devices present and developing every day. Multinational organizations, local bodies and even individual users are all dependent on computers for their day to day computing needs and this need is ever increasing. This involves storing and manipulating critical to personal data. Thus giving rise to various security and misuse issues related to user's data. Employees of these organizations are found chatting, playing games, wasting time on social net- working and other useless web-sites during the office hours. Many web-sites are not allowed by the organizations proxy, however there are very simple ways to bypass the proxy and browse these web-sites. This gave rise to the need of a monitoring system. This paper aims to present a solution, which is a developed software which provides better security mechanism by incorporating USB attachment detection, desktop screen shot capture and network connection detection with visited web- site information, all at one point only. The developed soft- ware can be used as a desktop application by any enterprise or an individual user. The software can be installed by the administrator of the system and can monitor user's activity on the system. It keeps a log which the administrator can view any time he wants and monitor his machine. There's also an additional feature to email the log to the admin or send him an alert SMS on his cell-phone so that he can have correct information about the system even when he is located at a different location. It can be used by an enterprise to monitor the activity of their employees or even by individuals to safeguard their system from misuse and hence making employees to make optimal use of the office time.