What can ALTIRIS do?

[inquiring]

Out IT dept has activated a desktop icon for each desktop in our LAN that is an ALTIRIS software icon. IT says it is to inventory our desktop software. Ive looked at the ALTIRIS URL and that seems to be what the software does however I am concerned and want to know if the ALTIRIS software can "backdoor peeks" at other more detailed information like keystroke commands or web visitations, etc. What level of detail can the ALTIRIS extract and what information can it extract? Is this spyware perchance? Thank you for any detail that you can provide on this software.

 

[Dev]

Altiris is an imaging program. Probably your administrators are using this to make an image of your hard drive in case your workstation ever crashes. The image is uploaded to an Altiris server and can be reimaged to a hard drive over the network. This is a godsend when you have many workstations to install.
It's sort of similar to ghost, but with certain benefits that ghost doesn't/didn't have. It's not spyware since the Altiris server is under your sysadmin's control.o

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[Guest]

Altiris is torjan spyware solution designed to "remote control and log". As others trojan spyware do. But it is "approved" by most virus-protection stuff, so such trojans are not counted as trojans.

Actually, having Altiris agent on your system does mean that someone is spying on you, it does include almost everything: RAM usage, processes launched, keylogging (any key you type will be sent to trojan's owner) etc.