I was at a virtual meeting today and I heard a voice bleed over from another private meeting

Do you realize that defense contractors are conducting their normal business using Skype and Google Meet! Their secret information still behind locked doors; but their confidential information is on the shared screen in each of their employees home computers.

What a time of averous for hackers good enough to defeat America's not so great cyber security... the Iran government, the Russian government, the Chinese government probably have a better time at it than most.

Maybe the point of the virus wasn't to necessarily kill people or ruin economies ... both of which hurt the perpetrator as much as they do the victim; so its important to be tempered in to only inflicting as much pain as you can handle your self... but maybe the point was to make whole industries, lead by your enemy ,supper charge their cyber usage; and you can just sit quietly collecting up all that prime data?

And who needs an AI to catalog all that data? The important bits sniffed up by your haking will be the ones people have been skyping about two or three days out of the week.

You might also want to create political tension in the target country; making sure to prolong the hysteria over virus as much as possible.

Maybe it would also help if you where to pay off or black mail the two leading candidates to be the next president. And you can make it easy for them; each doesn't need to know your involvement with the other; you can easily make them believe you are helping only their side; and feed them each morsels that will not allow each to have a decisive advantage

Then racket up social tensions ... and you have the whole US MIC on Skype every day for a year or two.

what did the voice say?

originally posted by: booyakasha
what did the voice say?

Hello, can you hear me

a reply to: DanDanDat

There are encrypted platforms.

Ironically our own government would like to make laws against encryption, and have hard backdoors.

That's where we could find weakness.

a reply to: DanDanDat

Have any links? You've must have heard it somewhere.

originally posted by: DanDanDat

originally posted by: booyakasha
what did the voice say?

Hello, can you hear me

OMG, Adele is a spy? I knew it!

pretty much impossible.
you did hear something though

If you wanted the same info in the old days you just went to the bar where they went for after work beers and listened in so its nothing new.

Working from home should have the same security precautions as being in the office so nothing should remain on the machine and quite often the use of VDI (Virtual Desktops) means you just stream down an image from the server and it does the hard work for you.

originally posted by: booyakasha
what did the voice say?

"We`ve been trying to contact you regarding your vehicles extended warranty...."

a reply to: Maxatoria

Well, major companies and government institutions did manage to keep the deep secrets to the oak-lined cigar rooms of elite social clubs in the old days. For good or ill.

The chatter at the local bar wasn't likely to involve fortune-500-level intellectual property defended by a phalanx of lawyers...but potentially leaked worldwide through the sieves of modern mass-market meeting platforms.

Was it Rajesh Singh from the Social Security Office? He's been calling me too.

a reply to: DanDanDat

Woah. Same thing happened to me and my coworkers yesterday. Conference meeting. Someone got on our line. They kept saying “hello” and “do you have a problem with your phone?”
We kept hanging up and rejoining the meeting but the voice kept coming back on. Weird.

I would imagine that defense contractors would be connected via VPN to their corporate network and then using something encrypted. I mean even Zoom just added encryption to their calls. As far as Skype, I believe it's being deprecated next year and everything moved to Teams.

originally posted by: EmmanuelGoldstein
Woah. Same thing happened to me and my coworkers yesterday. Conference meeting. Someone got on our line. They kept saying “hello” and “do you have a problem with your phone?”
We kept hanging up and rejoining the meeting but the voice kept coming back on. Weird.

It was really annoying that all of you kept hanging up on me.

a reply to: DanDanDat

People voluntarily...1,000,000's...store their important info and pics ..up in some companies "cloud"...and those same...don't seem to realize we have 3 computer "volumes" either.

Computer vol
Speaker vol
Microphone vol

One seems always to be cause on Zoom

originally posted by: Rekrul
a reply to: DanDanDat

Have any links? You've must have heard it somewhere.

I apologize, I have no links.

This was my own thought that popped into my head during the meeting.

I hope I'm wrong and that our cyber security is better than I am giving credit for here. But something tells me I'm not to far off.

originally posted by: peter_kandra
I would imagine that defense contractors would be connected via VPN to their corporate network and then using something encrypted. I mean even Zoom just added encryption to their calls. As far as Skype, I believe it's being deprecated next year and everything moved to Teams.

I would hope so; but when I use to work on government contracts we had to do annual cyber security training and one of the major concerns where attacks from inside the system. Either with a man on the inside or because someone let's the enemy in through a spear phishing attempt

a reply to: DanDanDat

Why would secretive people use the non encrypted platforms?

There are free services for people who just need to meet. Hell, there are free encrypted services too.

I'm more worried about our own country taking away civil liberties than foreign hackers. What happens if the politicians get their way and weaken encryption?

originally posted by: CriticalStinker
a reply to: DanDanDat

Why would secretive people use the non encrypted platforms?

The best place to hide a secret is in plain sight.

The fact you would be using a system that uses E2EE would be enough to perk up the ears of the spooks but a simple email may easily sneak past especially if it doesn't trip any automatic detection routines such as phrases.

I work for a defense contractor.

When cleared defense contractors are working from home they should not be accessing classified information.

Accessing that material should only be occurring on classified networks and systems. To my knowledge they should not be able to access a classified network from home.