'We have your porn collection': The rise of extortionware

Re:'We have your porn collection': The rise of extortionware by thomastjeffery on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @03:31PM (#26639240)

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.

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Re:'We have your porn collection': The rise of extortionware by oceanghost on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @04:28PM (#26652699)

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.

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Re:'We have your porn collection': The rise of extortionware by llampx on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @03:36PM (#26639309)

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.

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Re:'We have your porn collection': The rise of extortionware by thomastjeffery on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @03:49PM (#26639485)

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.

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Re:'We have your porn collection': The rise of extortionware by yjftsjthsd-h on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @03:38PM (#26639342)

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.

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Re:'We have your porn collection': The rise of extortionware by thomastjeffery on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @03:52PM (#26639528)

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".

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