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I was at home and had some work to be finished so I used IE connected remotely to my work PC finished the job but forgot to disconnect.

After a while I started watch not-safe-for-work material in Firefox at my local pc then I realized I am still connected to my work PC via RDP from my laptop. Am I in trouble? Can they know that I was watching not-safe-for-work material while I was connected to my work PC?

guest
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  • Yes, if you were still connected to VPN, they'll know the URLs you visited, and possibly, the content as well. – pri Jul 07 '18 at 18:50
  • thats scary, I did not visited on workpc though. I visited on my own network, they would know url info just because I was connected to their PC ? – guest Jul 07 '18 at 18:52
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    Was your Firefox instance running on your own computer or on the machine you connected on through RDP? Do you need to log into a VPN in order to start an RDP session? – Philipp Jul 07 '18 at 19:02
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    Firefox was running on my personal laptop, at the same time I was connected to work PC remotely via RDP. All the rather stupid activity was done in firefox – guest Jul 07 '18 at 19:06
  • @Philipp To your second question, I am not expert in network. But I usually go to comanay remote login enter my credential there then it give me option to connect via RDP – guest Jul 07 '18 at 19:14
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    You RDP directly to your work computer w/o the use of a VPN? This seems like a very non-standard practice from a workplace perspective. How is this accomplished? All people that "work from home" have their machines RDP ports exposed on a single/multiple public IPs? – Kritner Jul 08 '18 at 11:59

2 Answers2

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An RDP connection using the MS RDP client would not reveal activities on your local machine to the remote one.

Your description does not specify that you are definitely just connecting directly to a remote machine with a regular RDP client. There are a few scenarios that might affect this answer.

If you connect to RDP through a VPN, this means some or all of your internet traffic might be routed through your company network. The VPN might also set your DNS server. How do you know? In Windows 10, type route print in a terminal while connected to your RDP remote machine. Is the default route yours? Next try, ipconfig /all... are the DNS servers yours?

If the RDP client is not the MS RDP client, the provided software would be capable of spying on you, although this is probably unlikely. You could determine the name of the software, and if employee spying was a feature, it would probably be in the marketing materials.

Are you in trouble? Were you looking at things that are legal? Aren't you at home? This might also be a workplace question...

trognanders
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  • No i dont use vpn, company rely on rdp plugin provided by MSFT. The ipconfig/all shows my local dns servers only. – guest Jul 08 '18 at 13:14
  • This is kind of peculiar: *But I usually go to comanay remote login enter my credential there then it give me option to connect via RDP.* Do you actually use your work computer within the browser? In either case I would suggest checking the output of `route print` as well The line for `0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0` should have a gateway you know, and the interface should be the ip of your regular NIC that you connect to the internet with. – trognanders Jul 08 '18 at 20:35
  • No browser is used just to launch another application "Remote Desktop Connection" in my case. After that even if I close browser the application is still running. – guest Jul 08 '18 at 22:32
  • I checked the output of route print, both time when I am connected to remote as well when not connected looks pretty much same. === While connected to Remote IPV4 route table === 0.0.0.0 | 0.0.0.0 | 192.abc.e.e | 192.abc.e.xyz | 50 = When not connected ===== 0.0.0.0 | 0.0.0.0 | 192.abc.e.e | 192.abc.e.xyz | 50 – guest Jul 08 '18 at 22:33
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If Firefox was running on your own personal machine and you simply happened to have RDP running in the background, your company will not be able to tell what sites you visited unless they have spyware on your personal computer. The only way they would be able to see what you did is if you used Firefox on the remote computer through RDP.

forest
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