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Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

While I’m unsure how it would pick up anything useful I can certainly see how it would work in an enterprise office.

I’ve worked in the public sector for decades, and if you left an iPhone charger somewhere in an open office space, it would get used by someone.

Slip a few of those chargers into one of our massive orders for hardware and no one would ever find out.

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Yeah, stuxnet type of distribution, you keep few of them around the office "dropped on the pavement" and chance of success is quite high

I’ve heard of IT departments who place USB sticks around the building and then send nasty-grams to whoever plugs it into a device on the corporate network. (I don’t know exact details.)

What I don’t understand about this is how it’s supposed to work.

Plug anything into any port on our machines and it’ll either have the key to be recognised as one or our devices or be denied any sort of access.

This wasn’t always possible, but today even the keyboard is encrypted. And this is in a medium sized Danish municipality with a technical staff of 5, and it department of 20 and 10.000 employees.

If we can do it, any enterprise can do it.

Guess everyone has forgotten about Conversnitch, the RaspberryPi based microphone disguised as a lamp: http://vimeo.com/87564506

It's amazing to see that the video is from 7 years ago. Within the year the Amazon Echo was released and folks put microphones everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Echo#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Alexa

This was probably more useful in the past but nowadays even local traffic is usually encrypted. All you'd catch is DNS lookups.

That’s sort or my point. Everything is encrypted, even your keyboard and mouse are encrypted, so how is this supposed to work?

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