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The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

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Re: The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

#81

Post by fho »

sneak wrote: post #50
suifbwish wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An encrypted disk would be kind of useless in such a device as it would require the user to login every time the device reboots, unless they intend for it to never be rebooted. I’m not sure what you mean by network key in this case.

No, you can have the initrd boot to a dropbear sshd that allows the operator to ssh in on reboots and provide the key.

If you count on the device running "forever", or at least until you pick it up again, you could also just store the key on the device and delete/destroy it (the key) on boot.

Re: The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

#82

Post by justsomehnguy »

kotaKat wrote: post #80
wink wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also had this problem once, on a university campus though. "net send 'If you can read this, please call IT SUPPORT at ... and tell us'". It worked :)

Did that with a printer that came up on an audit at a hospital once. IT director told me to go to X site to find it based on its IP in the schema and I just cranked out a job to it that said to call my extension. Two minutes later the phone rang...

Sysadm 101: "Don't try to solve administrative tasks with technical means"

Re: The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

#83

Post by EvanKnowles »

magicalhippo wrote: post #23

Reminds me of this[1] good old quote from the IRC days hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is. [1]: http://bash.org/?5273

We had a prod case where a server was being flooded with requests, and a downstream server kept falling over. We figured it was an attack of some sort and investigated, eventually traced it back to a computer inside our own network (we're a big computer, five floors of computers).

It had an open file share, containing some Delphi books and from which we got the computer name too. So we walked over to the Delphi team's side, and kept yelling the computer name until some dude said "Hey, that's me!"

Turns out he was running a test-case, in an infinite loop until it worked (because that's how test cases worked), and he thought he was pointed at QA, but he somehow had it set up to target Prod.

Our job was done at that point, we left the rest to management (who made sure he didn't get fired but didn't do it again).

Re: The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

#84

Post by causality0 »

geek_at wrote: post #3

Author of the article here. Since I first published this blog post I was getting messages from people asking how it ended. Sadly it's pretty anticlimactic as the owner of the place had a meeting with the guy who put the Pi there (without me as he didn't want the Pi-dropper to feel ambushed) and in the end decided not to escalate it to legal and just basically told him to pack his things and get out. So no legal after…

Shoot, with the info you got I'd have least called his parents and tattled on him. If you can't put him in jail at least embarrass the shit out of him.

Re: The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

#85

Post by chiph »

suifbwish wrote: post #56
growt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then? The cable disappears into a wall together with 100s of other cables (which most likely are not labeled or not correctly, otherwise you wouldn't have lost the machine in the first place)

It is completely irresponsible and without excuse for any main network operator/owner to not be completely aware of what each and every cable does which is connected to a switch/network router. If the owner refuses to determine this, they are responsible if there is a nefarious device on the network until they do. Wireless makes this much more complicated so any responsible admin will ensure the wireless network is c…

We moved into a building where the drop-ceiling had pretty much every generation of cable, going back to Twinax used by IBM 5250 terminals. Previous tenants had cut the connectors off and just shoved them up there when they moved out.

Network documentation in this case? No way. The only option is to pull it all out for recycling, and start over.

Re: The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

#86

Post by Chris2048 »

smcl wrote: post #78
Chris2048 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oooh, I didn't realise they still had the key at that point. OK, I wouldn't have even said that - I'd have asked for the key back and boxed the remaining stuff myself. TBH, I'm surprised to what extend the employee would of had a bunch of stuff there - did they have furniture there or something?!

Yeah it sounds like the person was on good terms with the company and was trusted enough, must have stung for whoever made the decision to trust the ex-employee to be sorta betrayed like that. The blog author is somewhere in the comments here, I don't know if they're willing to share much more info but let's see what they say.

So the article mentions:

> It was registered (or first deployed or set up?) on May 13th 2018

and the post itself is dated 2019-01-16

Since it says:

> he could still have a key for a few months

I assumed that by then the employee had given back the key, but I guess I was making a few assumptions about when this happened, and when the device had been installed - they don't actually say what date the RADIUS logs revealed they had accessed the network.

Re: The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

#87

Post by didericis »

bitexploder wrote: post #76
xwdv wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Gifted” individuals are selected at early ages to run through rigorous education programs that greatly push them ahead of their peers. It is a pipeline to create intellectual elites and captains of industry. Gifted kids are widely accepted as the most intelligent kids of a school and held up as the finest examples of the school’s educational abilities.

Do kids in gifted programs go on to become intellectual elites and “captains of industry” at higher rates than their peers?

Good question. The programs themselves are generally good, as far as I’ve experienced, but the culture around them is often quite toxic. Many kids are treated like race horses. I’m not sure how effective they are on net. Most highly successful people seem like autodidacts that end up finding the resources they need one way or another. Would guess the best way to create more of those people is just to keep a lot of doors open and hope someone like that walks through.

Re: The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

#88

Post by TabTwo »

suifbwish wrote: post #56
growt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then? The cable disappears into a wall together with 100s of other cables (which most likely are not labeled or not correctly, otherwise you wouldn't have lost the machine in the first place)

It is completely irresponsible and without excuse for any main network operator/owner to not be completely aware of what each and every cable does which is connected to a switch/network router. If the owner refuses to determine this, they are responsible if there is a nefarious device on the network until they do. Wireless makes this much more complicated so any responsible admin will ensure the wireless network is c…

Customer site, big insurance company. The started documenting cables and labeling them to get rid of old faulty documentation. Half way through their security department forced them to stop. Why? If an attacker gains access to the documentation he would have all the information he needed. So, the had three types of cables: old ones with faulty labels, cables with right labels and unlabeled cables. And then there was me, in the server room at 3 a.m. tracing a cable by pulling up floor tiles because the cable was handmade and the rj45 plug wouldn’t fit into the new switch we installed that night.

Re: The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

#89

Post by antongribok »

wink wrote: post #26
magicalhippo wrote: post #23

Reminds me of this[1] good old quote from the IRC days hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is. [1]: http://bash.org/?5273

I've also had this problem once, on a university campus though. "net send 'If you can read this, please call IT SUPPORT at ... and tell us'". It worked :)

For a while the easiest and fastest way to identify a 1U server in a rack of 40 was to SSH in and type:

  eject

Re: The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

#90

Post by TorKlingberg »

GravitasFailure wrote: post #36
magicalhippo wrote: post #23

Reminds me of this[1] good old quote from the IRC days hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is. [1]: http://bash.org/?5273

When I first read that back in the day I thought how absurd and improbable it sounded because of how big computers were at the time. Now that raspberry pis and arduinos with wifi are a thing it seems almost inevitable.

It's even worse with virtual machines and containers. Those things can be left over anywhere and still appear as a machine on the network.
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