Home privacy when using work VPN on personal computer

Question

Here is a question from not so computer savvy user.

I have installed VPN client from my workplace on my personal home computer and use it to take brief connections to their network. Just recently I started to think, can they access my home folder and copy all the files from there? I have Windows 7 Pro. My home computer does not belong to the domain of my workplace and there is no addministrators account active on my computer, just my own. What is possible and what's not? Can't seem to find any specific answers by googling. Really awful thought they could snoop all around on my pc.

Answer 1

If you're not connected to the VPN, they have no more access to your computer than anyone else in the world.

If it is on, they have access to whatever shares that you have available on your home network, minus those that are password protected.

Answer 2

It depends. They would certainly have access to anything in a public/shared folder. Anything beyond that will depend greatly on security settings you have in place for your computer.

Answer 3

If they provided the VPN client software, then, conceivably, they could have access to anything you have on the computer. It all comes down to your level of paranoia. The more you think about it, the worse it gets...

Answer 4

When you connect to your work's VPN, it's essentially like you took your machine to work and plugged it into the network. So if you have any publicly shared folders, or folders that enable anonymous access, then yes, they would be accessible to someone on your work network. However, if you don't have anything publicly accessible in your computer's network permissions, and you have no guest account enabled, then they couldn't access anything.

Someone at work could access your home computer via a UNC path and the IP of your VPN adapter (e.g. \10.0.1.1 to see your shared folders). However, your home computer probably wouldn't be accessible via its hostname (e.g. \HomeComputerName).