Re: All because they wanted to save a little money
How about fire sprinkler pipes?
"Don't Look Up: Ubiquitous Data Exfiltration Pathways in Commercial Spaces" by Anku Adhikari, Samuel Guo, Paris Smaragdis, Marianne Winslett (arXiv, 2022).
Abstract: We show that as a side effect of building code requirements, almost all commercial buildings today are vulnerable to a novel data exfiltration attack, even if they are air-gapped and secured against traditional attacks. The new attack uses vibrations from an inconspicuous transmitter to send data across the building's physical infrastructure to a receiver. Our analysis and experiments with several large real-world buildings show a single-frequency bit rate of 300Kbps, which is sufficient to transmit ordinary files, real-time MP3-quality audio, or periodic high-quality still photos. The attacker can use multiple channels to transmit, for example, real-time MP4-quality video. We discuss the difficulty of detecting the attack and the viability of various potential countermeasures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12944
Biting the hand that feeds IT
