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ugh. I picked up a shitty NUC from ewaste and it had a label on it for an AI company.
ahh, another startup that burnt out trying to build some silly AI project on crap hardware. I wonder what they did? I check their URL:
ahh. healthcare. great, great.

also I hope they wiped these hard drives

but given the state of them when they arrived at ewaste?

no they did not

when you see a gaylord stacked high with NUCs and half of them still have USB fans attached, you know these were all just yanked off a shelf.
no one wiped these.

I have now stuck the hard drive in my imaging box

it turns out it was in service as of June.

and this one has log errors about the sensors in the bathroom and bedroom. this was used. fuck.

HEY FUN FACT: this was used as part of an Alexa/google home type thing! this is the "cloud" half, as in the part sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
It turns out every time the customer asked for something from the smart assistant, the WAV file was sent to the cloud box

where it is still stored. and I now have eleven thousand wave files

god the logs are full of errors about assorted video streams failing.
so this thing was connecting to something which had cameras. like, I can tell which room of the house failed.

now I don't think there's any video stored on this device, but keep in mind: the fools that made this thing fill up with WAV files? they also designed the video streaming part. Where are those videos stored, and how safe are they?

or maybe the fools who dumped all the NUCs from their entire "AI remote healthcare" in the recycling without yanking any drives are just somehow REALLY GOOD at knowing how to secure their s3 buckets.

assuming their S3 keys aren't just saved in this harddrive somewhere

jesus christ this isn't the only time THIS MONTH I've found an IoT device and checked the filesystem contents and it's got their private git repos on it

and now I can email the lead developer.

or just commit to their git repo, I guess.

okay so the good news is that they don't just have S3 keys laying around in plain text.
the other good news is that they have a secrets manager
the bad news is that they rolled their own secrets manager
the extra bad news is that I have the source for said secrets manager
and the extra extra bad news is that it has to decrypt those keys without external input, meaning I have all the parts here to pull out their s3 keys

oh hey!

this thing authenticates to some of their servers (which are still up, even if the company might not be (this is unknown at the moment)) over SSH! using keys kept in the same home-rolled vault thing!

so I can SSH into their servers now!

oh god this thing sends email from gmail

please tell me they didn't embed the google login into this device

tempted to drive past their HQ with a megaphone "I'VE GOT YOUR MODELS, YOU AI HACKS!"

wait. did they seriously stuff videos into their redis database?

they sure did! I have a video of someone picking something up from outside a door.

okay found their S3 creds. they hardcoded them in a Jenkinsfile.

not a good sign to see a bash case statement for environment, and prod sets the server to FOOBAR.EGG
and test sets the server to... FOOBAR.EGG

anyway I'm gonna be near their HQ on thursday. Maybe I'll stop by and ask if they're still in business, and if they are, do they know where their NUCs are?

SeanOMik

@foone where do you find these devices? eBay? A local recycling center?

@foone @SeanOMik *old person voice* Back in my day we used to have to dumpster dive. Now they just give you all of PROD as is

@catsalad @foone @SeanOMik just pull up to an office and break in. free computers.

Btw, I am not held liable for any damages or criminal activity that you, your spouse, and your cat does.

@alex02 @catsalad @foone @SeanOMik
Sometimes the billionaire owner will do this for you in an ill thought out attempt to cut costs and eliminate network redundancy, driving up to the data center himself to yank out the racks of computers with a pocket knife, and hiring anyone nearby to drive the stuff across the country in a Uhaul van

At least that's what I heard....

@foone @SeanOMik i thought about a local recycling ewaste company being a front for hoarding a lot of sensitive data from systems because people don't wipe which would make it an interesting watering hole if you think about it.

@foone @SeanOMik two decades ago large companies used to hand their decommissioned and written off fleets to an intermediate who would auction it off eBay by single units (with scrubbed drives of course), but now all the expensive and still perfectly working hardware a lot of people could use just goes straight to the recycling as e-waste?

@IngaLovinde@embracing.space @foone@digipres.club @SeanOMik@hachyderm.io I still find lots of great deals on "used" corporate hardware on ebay tbh

I was literally going to buy a POWER9 server from there for like $2k, which was an absolute steal for the cores + 512GB RAM, so some companies still auction things off I think