17 ms·
> belonged to a conference room and was used for presentations Yikes. My first though was - oh this should be no big deal chances are there are good policies i
by whalesalad 6y ago
> belonged to a conference room and was used for presentations
Yikes. My first though was - oh this should be no big deal chances are there are good policies in place for laptops that go home with people.
Then I realized it is a shared/central machine which means it probably has the most effed up and relaxed security in the fleet, post-it notes with passwords taped to the palm rests, and god knows what else. IT departments are notorious for over-granting privileges to these shared machines due to the mixed use they typically recieve. After X help desk complaints you get fed up and check all the boxes in the permissions manager.
Hopefully, though, it is locked up and the data is inaccessible.
- simonh 6y agoIf it’s a shared machine for projecting notes, chances are it has nothing stored locally.
- the-dude 6y agoOr everything from everybody. We just don't know.
- jspash 6y agopresentation-2-Rewrite.pdf.bak.PPT presentation-BROKEN.PPT anotherpresentation.doc cantopen_presentaion-dontdelete,PPT MOMs_COOKIE_RECIPE.doc caterpillar french fry funny.bmp and so on...
- edgyquant 6y agodeep-state-war-plans.doc
- dylan604 6y agoopening this doc opens a video of a guy singing about never giving up
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- salawat 6y agoThat's why you jave to open deep-state-war-plans.doc:ze_real_plans Damn alternative data streams. Speaking of which, I always wondered why windows didn't make better use of those. Seems like it would cut down on the FS bloat.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago> caterpillar french fry funny.bmp Literally laughed out loud, as my grandma had actually sent me that comic just a month ago. It's the quintessential Forward From Grandma. Pretty sure that one's been floating around the Internet since the 90s at least, and likely existed way before then.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- omarhaneef 6y agoIf I had to bet: -- someone accidentally stored something -- that thing is no big deal, perhaps technically a secret -- people who get ahold of it and read it will make up conspiracy theories about it
- baldfat 6y agoPeople who make up their truths that can't be disproven already have all that they need. a missing laptop.
- romwell 6y agoBehold the EVIDENCE of GREAT CONSPIRACY! Breaking! This below was found on Pelosi's laptop! -----====POWER POINT PRESENTATION====---- ALL GOVERNMENT ARE PEDOPHILES EXCEPT TRUMP PROOF: CIA REPORT
- Joeri 6y agoHonestly, those people didn’t even need that. They need nothing founded in reality to make up their conspiracy theories, which is why no argument from reality can weaken them.
- baldfat 6y agoOne of the most intelligent programmers who has been in the game since the early 80s posted the he is refusing to ever vote again till he knows his vote isn't stolen.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- baldfat 6y agoOne of the most intelligent programmers who has been in the game since the early 80s posted the he is refusing to ever vote again till he knows his vote isn't stolen. They WON in 2016 House Senate and Presidential and claimed MILLIONS of votes were fraud and the commission setup by Republicans found nothing and went away. 2018 They kept the Senate and lost the house by a smaller number then anticipated 2020 Republicans WON seats though it was expected to lose seats. They "Kept the Senate" just had a run off in Georgia. November 2020 was a good night for Republicans minus President Trump who is a love him or hate him person. Republicans didn't vote for Trump and is why he is out.
- johnnyballgame 6y agoOptimistic thinking. Chances are it has many PDF and PowerPoint files scattered on it. And probably a shared user account where the files fill up a Windows desktop.
- ladyanita22 6y agoThat is so... ... realistic
- chasd00 6y agoyeah, i bet it has every presentation ever done sitting in good ol' ~/Documents or the desktop.
- cptskippy 6y agoDoes anyone use /Documents? That's just a folder where Apps like Acrobat put garbage files.
- chasd00 6y agoon my laptop that's the default when i do save-as. I see someone plugging in a jump drive, opening the presentation, and then doing a save-as to Documents so "it runs faster"
- jefft255 6y agoWell back in Win 98 I used "My documents" a lot ahah. Now on Windows 10 Documents/ is often automatically backed-up in Onedrive (it is for me) so I started using it for saving some documents that I want to back up in the cloud.
- paganel 6y agoI'm on Mac OSX and almost all my non-programming files are in /Downloads. Maybe some other HN-ers have a better folder management technique than mine (which basically is absent), I'm curious what that is.
- 6y ago
- analog31 6y agoThese folks don't trust one another with information, so it seems unlikely that they'd pass around a laptop loaded with one anothers presentations.
- rscho 6y agoThese folks are also among the most tech-unsavvy people on Earth...
- ojbyrne 6y agoI don’t think it’s too much of a conspiracy theory to think that some foreign intelligence operative might have sensed a opportunity on Wednesday.
- johannes1234321 6y agoThis would require them to be in the front line early. I think it's more likely that somebody was randomly there and saw the opportunity. If you look at the videos most seem to be surprised to be in some of low manner. If you have some operative in there you increase chaos by creating some small fire or something ...
- 83 6y agoWould they have had to be there early? Russian embassy isn't that far away and I think rioters were in there plenty long (wasn't it a couple hours?) for someone to walk over, pay 20 dollars for a trump flag, and walk in unnoticed. I wouldn't be surprised if our embassies and CIA outposts have people ready to take advantage of such situations in other countries.
- johannes1234321 6y agoYou have to get through the crowd, and you have to be there before somebody else stole it and in time before police manages to lock down critical offices. Quite some effort. Compare it to a random person suddenly standing in front of an unprotected laptop from those "bad politicians" ...
- Matthias247 6y agoSame chances are it has every presentation done in the last 5 years copied to the desktop, in order to give presenters their USB sticks back.
- mywittyname 6y agoExcept cookies for a whole bunch of websites. Maybe even saved passwords in the browser, etc.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aksss 6y agoThere's a lot more value to a conference room PC than residual files. It's a machine probably on the same LAN as a lot of the meeting attendees in the conference room, probably has Bluetooth radio as well, may have wifi radios, probably has access to a calendar of meetings and attendees (as a defined room resource). Depending on how the PC is used (a room system vs the ol' conference room PC) it may also a key logger would be valuable. Reminds me of the scene in Firefly: "let me get this straight, you put multiple high-ranking intelligence officials in the same room as a psychic??" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC9SF7TOyHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC9SF7TOyHQ
- geofft 6y agoThe presentation machines at my workplace (in addition to being desktops in a locked cabinet, because why would they leave the room?) just allow you to remote desktop back to your real workstation or to a VM. They have nothing locally. I think that's a good solution to avoiding over-granting privileges.
- whalesalad 6y agoI would absolutely hope that it behaves like a dumb terminal but honestly you never know.
- tutfbhuf 6y agoWell I guess gov knows.
- ladyanita22 6y agoHow can you lock up Windows like that?
- dahdum 6y agoThin clients are the easiest way to handle it, all they can do is connect to a terminal server, no local storage.
- Avery3R 6y agoI don't know what the best practice for doing this would be but I would change the default shell from explorer to mstsc (the terminal services/remote desktop client) and disable task manager and internet explorer. I don't think that would perfectly lock it down, but it would do the job for ~90% of use cases.
- geofft 6y agoRight, the goal is not to prevent a malicious user from running things, it's to make a usable environment for non-malicious users (via giving them Remote Desktop) so they don't feel the need to install anything that someone else could later attack.
- debt 6y ago"no big deal" A stolen laptop is usually not considered "no big deal" basically everywhere I worked.
- jerkstate 6y agoReally? Every place I have worked with more than about 50 employees has used full drive encryption, so a laptop being stolen is not an infosec risk at all.
- jandrese 6y agoFDE only works if the machine is powered off. If a machine is stolen while it is still running there's a risk the user account could be compromised. Depending how sophisticated your adversary is they could potentially completely compromise the machine and extract all of the data. When you have physical access and no time pressure the options are vast.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago> Depending how sophisticated your adversary is The videos I saw don't inspire much dread, there, but they may give the laptop to someone that can do digital forensics. Lots of LEOs in that lot. They would be smart enough to stay out of the building, but might have been waiting for someone to come out with something like that. But, as someone pointed out, a lot of the folks wouldn't bother trying to read anything. They'd probably try to plant their own fantasies onto it, and send it to Rudy The Hair Dye Man.
- jandrese 6y agoThey'll probably give it to that computer repair guy in Deleware so he can pull off all of the emails from March of 2021 and somehow lose them in the mail when he tries to send them to Fox News.
- reaperducer 6y ago
- m463 6y agoMaybe stealing it also removed a bunch of foreign operative bugs and keyloggers :) "How can we remove this compromised system from the building without letting on that we know" "just have a 'theft' remove it!"
- baybal2 6y agoWhy do you think any of your rogue nation club have any interest hacking US politicians, except for, probably, blackmail? US is an open society, and most US politicians speak what they think, or at least you can guess, or even ask them yourself! Those people are like open books. Unlike of your usual cabal totalitarians, who either don't speak at all, or purposefully try to hide their real aims by engaging in double speak, triple, quadruple speak.
- snoshy 6y agoSeems safe to assume that the Speaker of the House and her aides would have access to classified national intelligence that might not be open to the world, and would be valuable in it's own right. Things like progress and updates with Covid vaccines, their deployment plans, and lack of security around them would make information like it ripe for the black market and adversary governments in these times.
- baybal2 6y agoWhat would enemy spies get out of that. Even prima fascie top military secrets like battle plans (those must be updated and shuffled regularly to prevent a situation exactly like that) have very little immediate usefulness. It's 21st century, it's beyond anybody's ability to hide things like size, dislocation, and basic capabilities of your force
- suifbwish 6y agoOh you think the generals readily involve old Pelosi with the battle plans? I sort of doubt they would trust her with anything digital that’s supposed to be a secret.
- grogenaut 6y agoI worked on a barely do-not-distribute. Someone's spouse took a project member's laptop as hostage for alimony. Within 45 minutes of discovery and a phone call to the army equivalent of the FBI, agents were at the spouse's work and home searching for the laptop. Lucky for the spouse they thought it was the personal laptop (it was not marked) so they weren't prosecuted. This laptop could be much worse, or just fine.
- ptd 6y agoWhat is a “barely do-not-distribute?”
- YarickR2 6y agosecurity policy for documents
- ucha 6y agoIt's usually the second lowest security level, just above "Public" and below "Secret".
- throwaway201103 6y agoNever heard it called that. What I have heard is something along the lines of "confidential but unclassified" which seems more descriptive to me.
- notretarded 6y agoMetaphorically speaking. I.e. not quite DnD, but likely would want to be contained
- ucha 6y agoThose were the terms we used at an investment bank but I imagine different institutions use different classifications.
- hchz 6y ago
- gizmo686 6y agoIT should be able to revoke any access the machine has, so the only compromise would be what was already on the machine; which would be the case regardless of security policy, as they could just access the harddrive directly regardless of OS security policy. In practice, it wouldn't suprise me if that computer was locally storing passwords that were not specific to that machine, which might mean needing to revoke a bunch of passwords
- kenniskrag 6y ago> as they could just access the harddrive directly regardless of OS security policy. I think that's wrong if you consider disk encryption.
- fphhotchips 6y agoFrom what I've read, full disk encryption was optional in the House until very recently. If this was a shared machine it's almost certainly not encrypted.
- kenniskrag 6y agofull disk encryption is also possible with a shared computer. TPM and PBA are some keywords
- fragmede 6y agoPossible? Very. Likelihood of the computer's login password and thus hard drive decryption key attached to the computer's screen with a post-it note thus obviating the protection gained from full disk encryption? On a shared computer, high.
- kenniskrag 6y agoFor a computer most will use the back of the keyboard :) reminds me of this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- dfsegoat 6y agoIf it was a shared machine in a conference room, wouldn't it already physically be accessible to e.g. cleaning and other staff?
- michaelbuckbee 6y agoCleaning and other staff for secure locations still get background checks, training, etc. extremely different situation than people off the street.
- eplanit 6y agoOr, we get some really good transparency regarding the affairs of elected officials, and the workings of Congress.
- aksss 6y agoWikileaks? It will be dismissed as Russian misinformation.
- asveikau 6y agoThat all may be true, but what are the odds they didn't enable some kind of remote wipe on there?
- whalesalad 6y agoRemote wipe only works if you can communicate with the device. If it’s in some backwoods Appalachia klan den I’d imagine there isn’t good connectivity.