4 ms·

Perhaps it wasn't an exact byte match, but close enough to only 1 print job size within a reasonable time frame.

barelysapient 4y ago
Exactly this. If you know that its around 36kb, and had to be printed between two dates, the list narrows substantially. And more than likely, the printer queue or corporate compliance tools had additional functionality that made such a search trivial. I have my own story about this: In the early 2010's I had a boss that loved to call us and check in every day. We were a remote team and he had anxiety that we were all larking off. I later learned his technique was to open the dropbox admin tools to see the location of someone before calling them. "So, BarelySapient, where are you working at today?", he'd ask in a cheerful tone. But in reality, he was testing employee truthfulness. Every call. He later fired one of my co-workers when they reported to be working from home, but dropbox reported them somewhere in the Florida keys....
- mschuster91 4y ago
  ... and here I'm just happy about German employee and EU data protection laws. This kind of abuse would be plainly illegal here and entitle the employee to significant compensation.
  - simondotau 4y ago
    What part would be illegal?
rurp 4y ago
Certainly possible, but also relies on the assumption that this was done on company equipment. When leaking info under a vindictive boss I would think opsec rule #1 is avoid company equipment as much as possible. Even without a printer at home, it's quite easy to send a print job to a local office or shipping store.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Data exfiltration is an extremely dangerous risk in the world of corporate espionage, especially for a company like Tesla that is trying to be first to market with something as massive as FSD. There is no way I would send anything to an external print shop from company equipment; they are almost certainly on top of that as well.
  - rurp 4y ago
    This has gotten me genuinely curious, I wonder what the safest way to get a document like that onto your own device is. Printing it on a work printer doesn't seem ideal, but I don't really know what the best approach is. Maybe emailing it to an outside address or sharing it as a document via Dropbox or similar? Copying to physical storage? All of those seem fairly easy to monitor as well though. If any infosec experts feel like chiming in I'd love to learn more.
    - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
      > Maybe emailing it to an outside address Easily detected. > sharing it as a document via Dropbox or similar If you use a TLS-inspecting proxy/VPN, this will be detected. Otherwise, it depends on how much monitoring is going on, but at best they could suspect it. > Copying to physical storage? At my work, USB drives are disabled by MDM. You could use transfer the files over SSH. Even if you have an MitM SSH-inspecting VPN, once the SSH channel is established, you could tunnel a second SSH connection through the established insecure SSH session. Even then, with enough logging, you could detect that all local files were accessed sequentially which would raise a red flag. There's nothing you can do to prevent insider espionage that wouldn't raise false positives and block legitimate work, but you could at least detect it.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      It will always be a game of cat and mouse. Your protections for leaking are limited to legal whistleblower protections against retaliation, so odds are anything suggested here will potentially be traceable or suspicious, which may invite further scrutiny.

Exactly this. If you know that its around 36kb, and had to be printed between two dates, the list narrows substantially. And more than likely, the printer queue or corporate compliance tools had additional functionality that made such a search trivial. I have my own story about this: In the early 2010's I had a boss that loved to call us and check in every day. We were a remote team and he had anxiety that we were all larking off. I later learned his technique was to open the dropbox admin tools to see the location of someone before calling them. "So, BarelySapient, where are you working at today?", he'd ask in a cheerful tone. But in reality, he was testing employee truthfulness. Every call. He later fired one of my co-workers when they reported to be working from home, but dropbox reported them somewhere in the Florida keys....

mschuster91 4y ago
... and here I'm just happy about German employee and EU data protection laws. This kind of abuse would be plainly illegal here and entitle the employee to significant compensation.
- simondotau 4y ago
  What part would be illegal?

rurp 4y ago

Certainly possible, but also relies on the assumption that this was done on company equipment. When leaking info under a vindictive boss I would think opsec rule #1 is avoid company equipment as much as possible. Even without a printer at home, it's quite easy to send a print job to a local office or shipping store.

zdragnar 4y ago
Data exfiltration is an extremely dangerous risk in the world of corporate espionage, especially for a company like Tesla that is trying to be first to market with something as massive as FSD. There is no way I would send anything to an external print shop from company equipment; they are almost certainly on top of that as well.
- rurp 4y ago
  This has gotten me genuinely curious, I wonder what the safest way to get a document like that onto your own device is. Printing it on a work printer doesn't seem ideal, but I don't really know what the best approach is. Maybe emailing it to an outside address or sharing it as a document via Dropbox or similar? Copying to physical storage? All of those seem fairly easy to monitor as well though. If any infosec experts feel like chiming in I'd love to learn more.
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    > Maybe emailing it to an outside address Easily detected. > sharing it as a document via Dropbox or similar If you use a TLS-inspecting proxy/VPN, this will be detected. Otherwise, it depends on how much monitoring is going on, but at best they could suspect it. > Copying to physical storage? At my work, USB drives are disabled by MDM. You could use transfer the files over SSH. Even if you have an MitM SSH-inspecting VPN, once the SSH channel is established, you could tunnel a second SSH connection through the established insecure SSH session. Even then, with enough logging, you could detect that all local files were accessed sequentially which would raise a red flag. There's nothing you can do to prevent insider espionage that wouldn't raise false positives and block legitimate work, but you could at least detect it.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    It will always be a game of cat and mouse. Your protections for leaking are limited to legal whistleblower protections against retaliation, so odds are anything suggested here will potentially be traceable or suspicious, which may invite further scrutiny.