If you’re at a company that’s incentivized to do insider threat programs - big tech, finance, govt tech, any sort of serious funding - these tactics are commonplace.
If watermarked emails seems over the top, there are almost certainly IT security tools with extensive access running as a process on your machine for this use case too.
Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
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Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#272Google circa 2011~2012 used unicode homoglyphs in all-employee memos for the same purpose.
Another comment from this thread backing this up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33625024
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
He searched the printer logs . Presumably when Word sends stuff to the printer, it doesn't bother with all the extraneous garbage it puts in files. Printer communication hasn't changed much in decades.
Still. He’d have to have the same normal.dot, make the same space/tab choices, same fonts, etc. And in a large company, how many ~1 page letters get printed? What are the odds that there is only a single match in the entire company? I take this story similar to the binary coded space story: more likely to be apocryphal and promoted to deter future leakers than true stories about catching them in the past.
It's probably not the only bit of evidence. "Hmm, it's about the same size, it was printed at about the right time and... yeah it sounds like *that* guy, let's see what else he printed - oh, nothing? Cool."
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
I typically also only print 2-3 times a year as well. But those times are sensitive-ish documents (one being hard copies of my tax prep and return for my filing cabinet, even though it’s submitted electronically) and I don’t want them printed on a printer I don’t own (paranoia). (And my printer is not connected to the network, I connect via USB).
> one being hard copies of my tax prep and return for my filing cabinet ...what year is this? Like, I have some questions: 1) Why keep hard copies of documents created electronically when there are so many more redundant, more secure, and more convenient ways keep the electronic versions themselves? 2) What in God's name are you putting on your tax forms that warrants being that paranoid about who sees them?
1) It's been more than once that we've seen hackers completely wipe people's digital lives? I mean, how problematic will logging in to many of these services be if Google decides to lock your account?
2) As an American example, ask Trump, he really doesn't want to release that information for one reason or another. Simply put trying to figure out other peoples security and sensitivity sensibilities is not something you have all the details on and are making vast assumptions.
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporate networks tend to keep printer logs for extremely long durations. Also, printers at home are incredibly useful. I'm surprised more people don't have them. Especially now that online shopping (and therefore online returns) are so much more common and require printing return labels.
I have occasion to actually need to print something about twice a year. I don't know how it is that we live such drastically different lifestyles that you find them so incredibly useful.
I print once or twice a month--return labels, random home admin (taxes or city stuff), and I prefer paper boarding passes (w/ backup on my phone) because they're less fussy for a number of reasons than the phone. I also print documents that I need to carefully read or edit, because I am easily distracted when reading/editing boring stuff on a computer and can waste too much time writing about using printers on HN.
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly speaking, the story sounds somewhat believable to me. They likely misidentified the leaker with that silly analysis and fired them on the spot, would be just the usual modus operandi of musk.
How likely is it that there would just happen to be a file with exactly the same wrong size in the printer logs?
I‘d say if the letter was short it‘s pretty likely.
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps it wasn't an exact byte match, but close enough to only 1 print job size within a reasonable time frame.
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 al…
... 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.
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#278Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk (from a few years ago) had a fun similar story. Someone inside Tesla wrote a letter, I believe complaining about product defects, which was printed by a media outlet. Figuring that the leaker printed the letter at Tesla offices (i.e. likely didn't have a printer at home), Musk re-typed the letter in Word, found out exactly how many kilobytes a Word file with that exact text would be,…
> It's been a few years since I read the book so a couple of the details may be off, but that was the gist of the story
I read the book but did not remember that part. So, I searched it. You almost wrote verbatim. What are the chances a leaker(s) would print before leaking? Very low or none. So, that practice has very slim chances of success. The one in the tweet is a bit better. But has a escape route. Either - try to grammatically correct or paraphrase - it before leaking.
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simplest answer is that this didn’t happen and it’s just a myth.
Honestly speaking, the story sounds somewhat believable to me. They likely misidentified the leaker with that silly analysis and fired them on the spot, would be just the usual modus operandi of musk.
Which printers in that timeframe ever directly printed word files?
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#280Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk (from a few years ago) had a fun similar story. Someone inside Tesla wrote a letter, I believe complaining about product defects, which was printed by a media outlet. Figuring that the leaker printed the letter at Tesla offices (i.e. likely didn't have a printer at home), Musk re-typed the letter in Word, found out exactly how many kilobytes a Word file with that exact text would be,…
The most impressive/unbelievable part of this story is that 2 Word files, created separately, ended up with the same exact file size. I'd assume with all of the Metadata they cram in that this would be unlikely.
id assume a billionaire heir to a diamond mine with an econ BA parsing various different models of printer logs for fifteen offices late into the evening would have discredited the quote entirely, But the cult of personality implores me to insist even Stalin himself did something similar in both Haskell and emacs.