At my work (Windows computers), we are only supposed to install software through the company IT department.
They didn't have Firefox available, so I copied a portable version of Firefox onto my work computer. In theory, I could have ran it off the USB stick, but that was very slow, I just copied it to a separate folder on the computer.
A few months later, the IT person tells me that he knows that I am running Firefox, that I am not supposed to have it, and that I should delete it.
Whenever IT connects to your computer, to provide tech , they always ask permission, and you click something on your computer to give permission. Thus, I don't think they connected to my computer without my permission.
I think they ran some sort of a scan, because they knew of multiple people in my department with Firefox.
Question: how did they find out that I had Firefox? What else can they see? What can I do to get around that in the future?
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It doesn't matter where you ran Firefox from, USB drive, local hard drive, cloud storage, all program runs are logged by Windows and some software they likely have installed.
Windows keeps logs in the registry of which programs were run on the machine. The only way to deal with this is to manually delete the registry entries, which I would assume you don't have access to do.
Most antivirus, firewall, and similar software also have logs of what they have scanned, blocked, allowed access etc. Some keep these in the registry, some in log files. Again I'm guessing you don't have access to take care of those.
I would also assume they have set up your work network so they can just look at your internet traffic. Every time your browser communicates with a server it sends certain information, including the agent header, which has details on the browser you are connecting from. This is probably the only one you could do something about by installing an extension that lets you change the agent string easily. But, given that they still have the other methods to detect Firefox that you can't change, it may not help at all.