Prevent Geeks At Work From Seeing Your Files Remotely
People still don’t like to believe that the tech’s at the helpdesk can see
everything on their computer without actually being at the computer. If
anybody has administrator rights, and most members of the company
helpdesk do, as do many managers, they can see every file on the
computer. Chances are, there is at least one person in your company
that is fully willing to snoop around just for fun.
Administrators
can access admin shares on your computer as long as the Server
service is running. They can easily access the path on anybody’s computer using
Start > Run and typing:
computernamec$
Try
this on your own machine, and it will act the same. It opens the C
drive on the computer using the admin share. Of course, you replace
computername
with the computer name of your own computer. You can also change c$
to d$ to see the files on the D drive of the
computer.
The Server service is also used by many
tools that administrators
use to gather information about your PC, such as what software is
installed on it, or what web sites you view. I don’t know about you,
but I don’t want the dude at
the helpdesk to know I have an illegal copy of Office 2007 running on
my PC.
If you
have a computer at work and you don’t share files or a printer, disable
the Server Service on your computer. You can do so, perform the
following steps:
1. Right-click on My
Computer and select Manage.
2.
Expand Services and Applications.
3.
Click on Services.
4. On the
right side, find the Server service and
double-click on it.
5. Switch the Startup type
dropdown to Disabled.
6. Now
when an admin tries to
connect to your machine or use tools they will not be able to. Your
helpdesk will likely not even bother to
investigate why they cannot connect to your machine. Also they very
rarely find the problem if they do bother.
Find more Windows tips and articles like this at Technipages.
Tags: computer, files, geeks, helpdesk, pc, privacy, security, Windows, work