What people store is entirely irrelevant to the scam. It doesn't matter if you've never seen a porn flick, never visited an adult site.

The template is to get a credentials dump, email the user's email, offer the password from the dump as proof (most people re-use the same password).

I know what you've been watching (no they don't), I recorded you on cam (doesn't matter if you have a camera or not).

It doesn't have to be bullet-proof. It only has to work once to pay off.

This has nothing to do with the extortion scheme discussed in the article.

The last time I had a "work-laptop", I was fired (for boring reasons) suddenly and without prior notice, and had to immediately hand my laptop over. I wasn't even allowed to go back to my desk and gather my things, because the HR manager at that time was so paranoid.

I'm pretty confident I didn't have anything personal on there, but just to be certain I wasn't leaking passwords, I did a quick

    rm -rf ~ &; disown

Point being: employers have all the leverage over their hardware, and you never know how or when they will use it. Encryption is your friend.

I did something like this once. There was this critical bug in a system I had designed. It was no big deal, 2 days to fix.

Privately, the management had forbade me from fixing the bug. Literally forbade me, and assigned me lots of support work (that didn't have tickets-- it would look like I wasn't working). Then a month later the project manager makes a show of coming over to yell at me in front of everyone for this bug not being fixed.

I zero'd my personal data, walked out of the building and never went back.

You had time to enter that command (with or without sudo) before they took your machine back?

That said, I've heard of cases where an ex-employee was sued by their employer for deleting the drive, for example salespeople who maintain contact lists.

So I was told I was at a 1-on-1 meeting with my boss, and that the HR person needed to be part of that meeting. I brought the laptop in expecting to take notes or whatever.

I essentially got lucky, but they were a bit concerned when they saw me hastily typing, even though they had already revoked all of my credentials.

Isn't the takeaway "never store or do anything on company hardware that you want to keep to yourself"? I wouldn't trust personal material to a company laptop even if it was encrypted.

Yes, but my main concern was the data from my password manager, which existed elsewhere.

I don't remember for certain, but I may have set my password store to be permanently open, which leaves a copy of the encryption key in the user directory.

Really, the practice should already be, "if you have data you care about, then always have offsite backups".

I never though about telling other employees not to store porn on my servers, i will bring that up in the next meeting...i bet it's gonna be a blast :)

In the company I worked for hackers uploaded porn to our disks so I was told. Not sure why maybe they wanted the free disk-space. Or maybe they were planning to blackmail us. Or maybe it was the IT admin who got caught and then claimed it was the hackers.

Some pirate release groups will compromise servers with public IPs to use as FTP hosts. The people that actually post the torrents then download from the FTP host, create a torrent, and upload it to the tracker (from their own PC).

Those hosts usually have fat internet pipes, allowing a bunch of people to download a copy over FTP at once, letting you claim credit for the first rip. There's also probably less of a paper trail; most of the hosts I'm aware of require some kind of ID, and would almost certainly hand that data over to law enforcement.

In my best knowing such topsites are in most cases using colo with excellent peering. In comparing, most company file shares are local in office for best transfer speed. A other possible similarity situation is useing for XDCC bots: such bots have similar idea of usage compromised machine but are mostly lower grade computer than a topsite.

That explains it probably. I now remember the IT-admin mentioning FTP. Thanks for the insight

People just dont care about any of that. I cringe every time I see how average users use their computers (sysadmin experience).

And I don’t blame them, most of the time it works, even if they do it wrong.