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154 points mellosouls | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.033s | source
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isatsam ◴[] No.45184197[source]
I don't work in cybersecurity and, after looking at the site's homepage, couldn't exactly figure out from all the buzzwords what exactly is this product. The most concerning takeaway from this article for me is that the maintainers of Huntress (whatever it is) can keep a log of, as well as personally access, the users' browser history, history of launched executables, device's hostname, and presumably a lot of other information. How is this product not a total security nightmare?
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cbisnett ◴[] No.45185367[source]
Thanks for the feedback on not understanding what we sell from the homepage. We sell an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) product that we manage with our 24/7 SOC. To perform the investigations on potentially malicious activity, we can fetch files from the endpoint and review them. We log all of this activity and make it available to our customers. We are an extension of their security team, which means they trust us with this access. We’ve been doing this for more than 10 years and have built up a pretty good reputation, but I can see how that would freak some folks out. We also sell to businesses, so this is something that would be installed on a work computer.
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poemxo ◴[] No.45185882[source]
Is it clear to users that their system is monitored and that they have consented to screengrabbing? Unless those screenshots were merely simulated from the Chrome history.
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1. spogbiper ◴[] No.45186155[source]
This would generally be covered in your corporate acceptable use policy or employee handbook, where ever your employer describes what is allowable on corporate devices and what is monitored when you use them. Some companies also display a notification when you log in along the lines of "This is an XYZ Corp system, all activity is logged and monitored for malicious behavior"

in general, if you're using a company owned device (the target for this product and many others like it) you should always assume everything is logged

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2. hyperman1 ◴[] No.45186647[source]
Is this true outside the USA?

In the EU, employees have an expectation of privacy even on their corporate laptop. It is common for e.g. union workers to use corporate email to communicate, and the employer is not allowed to breach privacy here. Even chatter between worker is reasonably private by default.

I suspect, if the attacker is inside the EU, this article is technically a blatant breach of the GDPR. Not that the attacker will sue you for it, but customers might find this discomforting.

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3. cybergreg ◴[] No.45186666[source]
In the US, on a corporate owned device there is no expectation of privacy.
4. spogbiper ◴[] No.45187234[source]
It's an interesting question. Services like Huntress (there are many similar) only work by looking at what is happening on the computer. To some degree they are automated but there is a human review element to all of them where ultimately some person A will be looking at what some other person B did on the system. Not publishing it in a blog like this, but definitely violating the privacy of the valid user and/or a bad guy to some degree
5. viccis ◴[] No.45187789[source]
I can't imagine pen testers would be able to work in the EU without being able to access individual workstations without the users' knowledge.

The key difference here is that pen testing, as well as IT testing, is very explicitly scoped out in a legal contract, and part of that is that users have to told to consent to monitoring for relevant business purposes.

What happened in this blogpost is still outside of that scope, obviously. I doubt that Huntress could make the claim that their customer here was clearly told that they would be possibly monitoring their activity in the same way that a "Content to Monitoring" popup for every login on corporate machines does it.