How to track websites that have been visited?

Question

When I check my child's computer, his internet browser history is all blank. I strongly believe he deleted all the browsing history, cache and everything.

Is it possible to know what websites that my child has been visiting recently after he cleared his internet browser's data?

Answer 1

You can create an OpenDNS account, point your child's system to use OpenDNS and keep a track of websites used using that.

OpenDNS also allows you to block certain sites:

Each household is unique, so OpenDNS gives you flexibility in blocking Internet content. We divide the Internet's millions of websites neatly into 56 categories, like "adult," "games," "academic fraud" and "social media." Parents can block entire categories of content, or just choose to block the individual websites that you know are problematic or unsafe for your family. Or, for easier setup, you can choose a filtering level: low, medium or high. The low filtering level blocks just adult content, where the high filtering level blocks adult content, social networking sites, video-sharing sites and more.

Answer 2

Try

ipconfig /displaydns 

from command line. If there's too many, you can send it to a text file from

ipconfig /displaydns > dnslist.txt

Or, you could talk to your kid, and let him or her know you're concerned.

p.s.

Explanation on the output of this command is discussed here.

Answer 3

As everything is deleted, you have no way to know it at this time (except for asking the logs of your ISP, but I guess that's a bit over the top).

The only way to know this in the future without the child being able to circumvent it (as they always find ways ;-) is to enable logging on an intermediate device like a router.

Answer 4

Even when using private browsing modes, and even when deleting a browser's history, cache and cookies, Adobe Flash still keeps a cross-browser trace. It won't show you any dates (though maybe that information is kept as well), but it does show which Flash-enabled sites your computer account has visited since you bought it.

Maybe the introduction of How to automatically remove Flash history/privacy trail? Or stop Flash from storing it? helps investigating, though I meant to write that to protect ones privacy.

Answer 5

If you have a firewall/router, you can usually set it up to log all the outgoing/incoming traffic on your network. Depending on the router, you can even set it to the send the logs to specific ip or host on the network, there are a variety of programs out there to do this: One I've used with some success is Wallwatcher. It works with many devices, and is pretty customizable.

Answer 6

There something called Parental Control in Control Panel,

Parental Control allows you as the admin to change the allowed hours on the computer, if you want full control of your son's computer change your son's account under

• Control Panel
• All Control Panel Items
• User Accounts
• Manage Accounts
• Change an Account
• Change Account Type
• Change it to Standard

If you really want to catch him in the act, use remote desktop. All you need is a notebook or desktop, them you only need to know his IP, log in to your router to find the info.

Once you got the IP and port, log into remote desktop.

Answer 7

Use Family Keylogger will let you monitor what people you share your computer with type when you are away. Working in the background, Family Keylogger will record every keystroke a user makes in every application and save it to a text file. In Stealth mode, the program is totally invisible to other people who are not aware their computer activity is monitored.