Look, we all knew it was coming, but now it’s official. Microsoft just handed middle managers the ultimate weapon. Their new update for Microsoft 365 allows companies to track exactly where you are, and the days of pretending to be at your desk are over.
While making this easier to access isn’t a positive, there are a ton of ways that this can, and already is, being done at companies that actually care about this shit.
Yeah you’re totally in the office, but your laptop just magically has an IP from the subnet for devices connected over VPN 🙄
Once again I must insist that people need to stop expecting any privacy on work devices. It is possible to find out anything on them, including location, it’s just a matter of how much effort your workplace is willing to expend on looking.
Edit: While I appreciate the article being short and to the point, a link to any documentation on this would have been nice. The claim is that it will display the SSID of the Wi-Fi AP you’re connected to. While being able to get that from your phone is a new bit of reach, it’s possible to gather that from work devices easily.
Any company going this far will almost certainly be requiring device management on whatever device you put your work email on. So if you have your email on your personal phone the likelihood that they can already track your location 24/7 using your phone’s gps is extremely high.
I’m more worried about them listening to my mic and recording my camera at this point.
You don’t know how Cisco is triangulating your laptop’s position from APs in range, do ya? It’s 2015 tech, and it’s insane.
Being able to see where everyone’s cell phone is in the middle of an open-air concert … and whether and where it has been on the muni network since … has been valuable for cops looking to question a potential witness.
But yeah, if you’re reading this in the company loo, your IT people probably know, if they cared. They don’t care.
Hell, knowing when the boss’s phone lights up on the site wifi was great for ambushing him with a purc req first-thing. …or so I hear.
TL;DR: they don’t need to know which IP range you’re on, as their layer-1 has already ratted you out.
just use vpn all the time, even when at your desk in the office
Our VPN gateway is different if you are already on the internal network.
This will break a lot of applications.
This is literally how our corporate network is setup. You MUST be on vpn or you cant get to anything. Makes the access permissions super simple. Prior to this setup there were authorization settings that differed between on-prem/off, on vpn or off, which office you were in, etc. now they just deny all unless you vpn in and then it uses your vpn account to validate access there, in one place. Saved a lot of headaches.
That is certainly a direction. I hope you have robust redunacies on the concentrator.
That really depends on how the VPN is setup and configured on the company side. And possibly how the applications it their servers are configured as well. In our case, absolutely nothing breaks and it just works.
That’s why I send passive aggressive messages about my company on my work computer. Hopefully they see me laughing at their incompetence and obvious nepotism.
We’ll, uh, see how it works out.