Because every place I've worked (including corporations) I've had local admin on my box and could see the entire process tree. Usually you have to be running all the antivirus and monitoring stuff to connect to the employee network/VPN, but when you're off VPN you can kill those processes off.
>Because every place I've worked (including corporations) I've had local admin on my box and could see the entire process tree.
That's assuming that the spyware isn't some sort of rootkit that tries to hide its presence. If you're on windows, it's also very easy to hide behind some generic looking executables like svchost.exe
You are certainly correct, but a bit of light digging + reflection on your company can give you a lot of confidence. For example, I work at a startup and I can say with great certainty that my boss has way too much going on for him to have installed any sort of rootkit after wiping the previous data and before I set up my admin account.
I've been driven to the store and told to pick out my own computer and accessories and nobody ever had it in their hands for any length of time other than the employee who carried it to me. This has happened in two of my seven or so jobs. As a counterpoint, however, at another position the boss was indeed spying on us, which wasn't surprising if you worked there for any appreciable time since he was a complete control freak.
