record of logins

mustbemad

Hiya, I need to pick your techie brains yet again!

Is there any way of finding out dates and times your pc/internet has been logged in? The reason i'm asking is because my DH went looking for a site he had visited in his internet history today to find most of it has disappeared. The first day he can access is monday just gone and he definately wasnt on the net on that day as we didnt get back from our hols till the late evening. The worse thing is that there are some dodgy sites that have been accessed on monday. The only possibility is that our neighbour who had the keys so she could feed our cat has let her teenage son in and he has been using our pc :mad: If it is him the little git has been googling things like 'under 16 naturism' and you can imagine the sort of site that would bring up! Worrying for us that our isp would have records of us accessing that sort of site, well it doesnt look very good does it! Especially with the mention of under 16's I'm hoping that there is some record of what times our pc was logged into so we have proof when we confront our neighbour!

I have checked the maintenance page of our isp and small amounts of banwidth were used on each day we were away... does this mean the pc has been used or could that happen anyway?

Sorry for the ramble!

Angela x

timread

That doesn't sound good!

If you're running Windows XP, go to Start, Run. Type eventvwr and click OK. This will open the system event log. There are 3 logs: Application, Security, and System. There should be 100s to 1000s of entries in each. It's not so important what is being logged, but check the times and dates of the entries. This should give you an idea of when the PC was booted up and doing things.

To be more sure, check the Security and System event logs. This should show events from when the PC booted up, services starting, user logging in etc.

Hope this helps! And maybe change the door locks, or at least make sure that your computer requires a password for each user to log in (or change the password if it does already).

Chippy_Minton

Even if the Internet Explorer browsing history has been deleted you can still find out which sites have been visited and when by viewing IE's index.dat files (as long as they haven't been deleted of course).

Download Index.Dat Viewer from http://www.scanraid.com/indexdat.htm

amcluesent

>That doesn't sound good!<

This could be tricky. Remember the law on child pornography is strict - possesion itself is a serious offense (ie pictures are found on a PC over which you have control); they wouldn't need to prove you intended to download or create the images. I don't beleive a casual use of Google would turn up this material, but IMHO you should be using some 'washing' software to purge all logs and caches.

Omertron

Firstly, you should manually run a virus check and an anti-spyware check. If you have no clue how to do that, follow this thread.

Secondly, make sure that whatever user accounts you have on your PC have passwords. That will stop the casual interloper from logging in and using your PC. You can do this by going into the Control Panel, then User Accounts. For each user on your PC make sure that it says "Password Protected" by the icon. If it doesn't, click on the user icon and then click "Change my password". Enter a password that is not easy to guess, DON'T USE "Password" or "Secret" or children's name, etc.

Thirdly, go HERE and down load CCleaner. Install it and run it with default settings and it'll clear all of your internet cache, browsed sites, etc. and is a lot easier than working out what to clean from the internet explorer menus.

Finally, threaten the little wotsit, that you will tell his parents if you ever catch him on your PC again. :rotfl: