[RandomCitizen12]

I'm going to guess they scanned all company computers for a process named 'caffeine.exe' and people were dumb enough to use it.

There's something to be said for providing real physical input to a real physical HID.

[seniorThrowaway]

possibly but the article mentions devices from Amazon that became popular during the pandemic, so I'm thinking it's those physical mouse cradle / movers. Probably low performers which got management's attention and led them to start doing screen caps and seeing the mouse moving but no work being done. I wonder how many of these are 2nd or 3rd jobs for people, I know someone personally who did that with Wells.

[Rinzler89]

Or maybe they scanned the USB vendor ID's for those particular keystroke/mouse simulators off Amazon. Since usually on corporate machines you're not allowed to install software not whitelisted by IT without admin rights.

[seniorThrowaway]

Good point. If that's what they did the employees should have taken the super low tech route, set your optical mouse on an analog clock.

[Yoric]

In the heydays of Dark age of Camelot, a friend of mine hacked together a lego robot to craft all day long on their home computer while they were at work.

I'll ask them if they can open-source the design :)