The high-tech weapons bosses are using to catch WFH shirkers

Work from home? Big Brother is watching you – literally.

Last week, US bank Wells Fargo became the latest large company to sack employees after it found its remote staff had been using ‘mouse jigglers’ – hardware that fools bosses into thinking their minions’ work computers are in active use.

The monitoring software big corporations are legally using – malevolently called Bossware – has become increasingly prevalent as companies attempt to keep track of what actually happens during a Work From Home day.

And in this new workplace battleground, the tactics to avoid Bossware are developing too; a new war of attrition (or indeed indolence) where, well, AI will probably be the winner…

Microsoft Teams Away Status

This allows bosses to weaponise Teams: as soon as staff log in for work, their presence status can change to “Away” as swiftly as five minutes after their last active usage – alerting a manager that they’re not fully focused on the job at hand.

Other work-based business collaboration systems, such as Slack, work in a similar way – and it’s worth noting all of them enable bosses to see just about any activity occurring (or not) in the app during a working day.

Keyloggers

Quite a crude – but effective – way of monitoring employee activity is installing a keylogger on a laptop; a piece of software that literally records every keystroke and operation employees make while logged in to a work computer, ready for management review. It can look into everything from what apps an employee has open to who they’re chatting to – and what they’re saying.

Sneek and other webcam-based activity monitors

Still suspicious that WFH employees are sitting in the garden with a coffee? Sneek is just one webcam-based app promising “human contact for remote teams”. In effect it ties them to their screens for a working day through an ‘always on’ video connection under potentially constant surveillance. The other tactics companies use with installed webcams include regular ‘snapshots’ that detect desk presence or eye movement.

E-mail or web-browsing monitoring software

Employers are legally allowed to monitor websites visited and personal e-mails sent during a shift using activity logs – they just need to set out reasonable use and legitimate interest in the contract.

AI Bossware

Now this is really Big Brother. Some of the above monitoring tools combine the data they collect with AI machine learning to predict how employers will act during a working day – and even give them a risk rating – prompting further monitoring for extreme cases of idleness. Think this sounds a bit much? Workforce analytics tools like RemoteDesk, Veriato, and Perceptyx already use AI in this way.

Mouse jigglers

Hardware that simulates mouse activity on a computer screen by automatically moving the cursor, which keeps the computer active and avoids apps such as Teams switching to “away” or “inactive”.

Some of the more inventive examples have seen employees tape their computer mouse to a wooden spoon, fastened to a rotating fan – but you can just buy mouse jigglers cheaply on  Amazon these days. Sadly, though, they can’t fool keystroke tracking.

Away Status workarounds

If you’re not convinced your IT department has a particularly stringent set of security or monitoring protocols, you may be able to access settings and lengthen the amount of time until your business app goes into away mode. The other cunning plan is to start up a meeting on Teams with no-one else in it, so it looks like you’re actively busy…

Predicting screenshot timings

It is possible – with a lot of effort to be honest – to work out exactly when monitoring software is going to capture your image or the image of the screen. This way you can attempt to be busy immediately before and during the process.

Multiple windows

For those who really would rather be doing something else, having the main screen showing a movie while a second window has work-related tasks running can work – although not if the bossware is tracking activity as well as open applications.

Dual monitors or separate operating systems

It sounds simple – just have the computer or screen you want to do the fun stuff on running in a different space to the work one. But again, most of the time the work computer will still need activity and some semblance of productivity to avoid alerting the bossware. In reality, this ‘hack’ is no different to having the radio on or television in the background.

And finally...

The best workaround to Bossware is to be completely aware of what monitoring tools the organisation you work for employ, what they expect of you during a working day, and how they use the data they collect.

If it seems too invasive, it’s potentially not a company you would want to (avoid) working for in any case…