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I know it's not allowed to monitor employees' PCs without a reason or permission, however some still do it. Is there any way to find out if a spy or monitoring program is installed or running? What about on my home computer?

Kevin Mirsky
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Navid2132
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    Corporations are certainly allowed to monitor the usage of company machines. Traffic monitoring and usage logging is very normal. However your question is too broad and lacking info for us to give you a useful answer. At work at least, assume your org is logging your internet usage. Rule of thumb, don't do personal things on your work machine. Your home PC is highly unlikely to be monitored by your company. – Kevin Mirsky Apr 18 '19 at 13:32
  • Just reinstall your PC OS if you want to go the safe way. – Cyberduck Apr 18 '19 at 15:41

2 Answers2

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TL,DR: You cannot know for sure.

While some monitoring programs will be visible on your systray or have splash screens, the majority of spying programs will be invisible, silent, and hide themselves very well. Some will even disguise themselves as system utilities or load its components inside legitimate programs. So you would probably miss them.

You could monitor the internet traffic and search for unusual patterns, but once again spy programs can disguise their transmission so you would not find anything.

If you suspect your home computer is infected with spyware, backup, format and reinstall everything from scratch. It's the only way to be sure.

ThoriumBR
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Scan your computer with licensed antivirus & internet secrurity software. They will alert you if something happening wrong. If you want check without any software then service running on windows from Windows Task Manager, you may get unwanted or some unusual name service which are running in back ground. Stop those service and uninstall software related to that and check startup folder of you window system. If there exist unusual or malicious file in that. Then remove those files

Nikhil Jain
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    Sadly, no, this isn't going to work. No AV package can pick up 100% of malicious software and remain useful, and it would miss things like a system-wide proxy routing all traffic via another system. You can also inject code into legitimate applications (explorer.exe is traditional), avoiding it from showing in task manager apps. There are ways to detect this, but they need more effort than this. – Matthew Apr 18 '19 at 16:08