Horror Story #1

In the heyday of Napster, one our clients perceived a dramatic slowdown in its Internet connection during the business day. At the behest of this client, who was concerned they perhaps weren't getting the Internet speed their ISP promised, Escape monitored the connections for a period of time.

We found the problem was definitely not with the ISP -- instead, we observed vast amounts of MP3s and movies being downloaded by employees. In some cases, these employees were siphoning off upwards of 70% of the available Internet connection bandwidth. As a result, the companies were able to address what turned out to be a personnel issue.

Horror Story #2

Several years ago, before DSL became widely available, one of our clients had an ISDN connection for their Internet connectivity. ISDN, unlike DSL, required the customer to pay per minute the Internet connection was actually being used (once everyone stopped surfing for a minute or so, the connection automatically shut off). One month, the customer got a bill for several thousand dollars which claimed the connection had been on virtually nonstop for the entire month. Horrified, the client called on us to research what could possibly be happening.

Their ISP further indicated the problem had not yet gone away and they could expect another humongous bill the following month. Escape quickly set up a network traffic sniffer and easily deduced that one employee of the company had installed a screensaver for the now-defunct news "push" service PointCast, which automatically sent news updates every few minutes, thereby keeping the ISDN connection live nearly all the time his computer was on.