Will hackers defeat time trackers?
This case of a woman who slacked off, got fired, and then sued for wrongful dismissal is pretty interesting. She lost because the audit software monitoring her work on her laptop revealed that
She billed for files she didn’t work on,
billed for 50 hours of work she didn’t do, And
her various excuses were false, e.g., "I worked on hard copy," but there was no record of printing the volume of pages necessary for that.
Right now, this sort of software is only mandatory at some workplaces, but it seems like it’ll be more ubiquitous in the future. I suspect that crackz for such software to allow users to edit what the software sees will be popular. It’s just a rootkit that logs; surely it will be vulnerable to another rootkit inserting itself between it and the system.
Maybe a new market will open up for apps that hack the audit software. It would actually benefit from a rental license model as it’s critical that the crack be updated quickly when the audit software updates. Which requires committed development time. Of course, the audit software companies will hire game anti-cheat developers to work on their systems, and things will get interesting.
Evading Time Tracking Software
The existing hacks seem pretty uninteresting:
Automated mouse movement,
disabling the software,
using a VM,
using a second computer, etc., etc.
The solution to these bypasses, the developers have decided, is for audit software is to be more invasive. Monitor sounds. Take screenshots. Provide remote access for employers to directly monitor systems. Dystopian stuff. but also vulnerable to spoofing.
The sound is probably the most trivial to trick. An AI could just sample ambient noise for a while and mimic that with various mix-ins for variety. There are tools to mimic someone’s voice based on a small sample.
But I’m not sure you even need an AI to manage spoofing the audio stream. Existing "quiet office background" noise generators are basically sufficient. And, of course, most of the time the background noise is just LoFi Girl and *clack* *clack* *clack*
The thought provoking way to defeat time tracking software is hiring someone else to do your work for you. Work arbitrage! This seems like a good indication that the job is a “bullshit job.” And it would be better to automate it.
One interesting technique that’s suggested is tracking work patterns for employees and then using that to find anomalous workers. or to use it to figure out when to screenshot employees. What this says to me is that an AI can learn what someone is supposed to be doing at any time of the day. So, why not have an AI that emulates that work pattern for the time tracking software?
The best part about an A.I. creating fake screens for the audit software to screenshot is that there are no hands, so it will be easy to draw.
