Determining personal email use of company workstation ?

In a small business, with the onsite workstations behind the router, I'm trying to come up with a way to determine if employee has been using the workstation for personal work, like email, social media, etc.
The traffic is not likely to be via the Server, which is mainly for backoffice work, AR/AP/bookkeeping matters with only limited use of outside email via established/automated links. The traffic is all being managed via one Router and one Internet Modem.

My guess is the first step is just lay hands on the workstations and see how the cookies crumble. Unless the browser is set to purge on close or the employee wisely deletes all the cookies, we should be able to see that Gmail or yahoo or whatever has been accessed. But beyond that I'm not so sure much at all can be determined without intrusion that may not stand up well.
My experience has been that few small businesses ever know how to set administrative tools on the router but it is worth checking I think. If blind luck, the traffic might be logged by MAC address?

My limited understanding is that not all routers have serious Admin tools for logging the traffic to/from the connected devices on the WIFI channels or LAN/ether. Some do, so I will need to get at the router and check. Otherwise, only snooping the workstation gives any info.... Am I missing a trick?

thx

Hello, it would be easier to block the sites on the router if you don't want access.

I have no idea how much it costs, nor have I ever used the product, but there is employee monitoring software available:
Employee Computer Monitoring Software | Ekran System.

Another option, with the appropriate disclosures and employee agreements would be the installation of "security" cameras capable of capturing computer screens in addition to everything else.

Depending on how many employee there is.

A Router with "Traffic Analysis" will give you advanced statistics on whatever is going on with your users Internet usage.

These are good answers all. I'm hoping the cookies have not been cleared, as Samuria mentioned, because the ws is identifiable by its MAC and by matching up the IP, then if the cookies have nada to do with work and are specific to say yahoo mail [just an example] that would be useful. The router I don't know yet - the boss there should be sending me the model info but many do not have good logging and those that do would need some work to setup.

Only the front desk people are more or less 'stationary' during work hours - everyone else is on their feet a lot so the personal stuff happens when there's a lull, and if the person would just step away and use their cellphone I guess it wouldn't be at issue. Anyway I am just trying to provide some guidance on running down the real evidence that may be already available.

I use these little guys, I enabled it on mine for a couple minutes to show how it looks.

Amazon.com for 100Mb/s and less internet
Amazon.ca for up to 1Gb/s internet

Inexpensive little power house, routing capabilities and feature sets are amazing.



I configure them to do Nat to Nat activate statefull packet inspection, install them between the customers router and the local network, then let them run a little.

You can then sit down with the owner, present him live usage and then he can decides if he need / want to block access to users.

If it's the case, for small business the most economic way (free) is to enforce and use OpenDNS, Cloud Delivered Enterprise Security on local network, use a caching local DNS Server and use the OpenDNS control panel to block undesired Web services. It also have many other options.

Once this in place create firewall rules that block all outgoing DNS queries except to your router and OpenDNS servers.
With a couple more rules, block all VPNs... You can be pretty sure there's not much left to do, but work.

Bye bye (Insert whatever you think of here)... Add a good Cellular Jammer and it's done.

OpenDNS is very easy to setup for home uses too and you can make sure undesired content never reaches your network. I set-up that many times, used it all the time and recommend it if you need a simple but brutal solution.

, Email, porn then youtube, nice!