1. Initial access to physical machine, most likely via phishing malware, reckless employees downloading untrusted content, or bad luck.

2. Malware looks for browser cookies, hoping to steal temporary credentials but instead gains persistent creds, which grant Jira access. People re-use passwords; malware tries this password against AdUser and any other systems or other corp user accounts it can find

3. Direct Jira access used to pivot, that custom Jira app is probed for app vulns (likely given design).

1. Get e-mail from boss, look at headers, find boss IP addy

2. Failing that, memorize boss office number or workstation tag, run stealthy network scan, do reverse dns lookup

3. Be a router, arp spoof mitm attack

4. ?????

5. Profit

Sorry to hear that! Hope OP got a good sev package at least?

Most traffic is encrypted with HTTPS unless you can root every single device you own

we have microphone use indicators on mobile, and I would imagine it would be pretty clear if an app was uploading audio with even very basic monitoring tools.

Complicated smartphone OS, firmware, drivers might have bugs allow overrides of visual indicators.

Companies have also been known to secretly eavesdrop and not tell users before (Apple + Siri https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-approves-95-million-app...)

>Complicated smartphone OS, firmware, drivers might have bugs allow overrides of visual indicators.

This line of thinking gets dangerously close to unfalsifiable territory.

If apps are eavesdropping on us, where's the network data? It's encrypted.

But you can disable https pinning by jailbreaking/rooting? The spying logic automatically disables if it detects it's jailbroken/rooted.

Where's the jailbreak/root detection logic? It's buried in 9 layers of obfuscation so you can't find it.

What about microphone indicator? They found a 0day in both Android and iOS, or the two are complicit as well.

But we don't see any backdoors in AOSP? It's built into the hardware/baseband itself.

>Companies have also been known to secretly eavesdrop and not tell users before (Apple + Siri https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-approves-95-million-app...)

"secretly eavesdrop" implies they were intentionally doing it, when even the plaintiffs admit it wasn't intentional.

However I was more thinking of simple things, such as disabling anything that SHOULD be communicating with the Internet and seeing if any constant traffic persists.

Now of course, some very small (e.g plaintext) traffic might be almost undetectable, however that would suggest that most of the data would not be able to be transmitted due to size.

I've used all 3 major providers - AWS, GCP, Azure.

AWS is no gem... it also has it's own byzantine processes to sign up and pay for things. And it also doesn't support any real and reasonable way to stop spend when you hit limits (abusive practices).

But at least I can generally sign up for and consume a new service without hours and hours of debugging.

For context - Google own Gemini 3 utterly fails to figure out how to do something as simple as "access the image doodle feature" proudly marketed here: https://gemini.google/overview/image-generation/

It can't figure out how to do. Honestly, I still can't figure out how to do it, despite signing up for about 5 different products, and trying 4 different UIs. The closest I got was to their inpainting/outpainting UI on the legacy models in their image create studio.

And none of that involved creating a billing account, which I already had, and was required for 3 of the signups.

As far as I'm concerned, this feature is fake marketing. It doesn't exist. That's the "quality" level of GCP.

It was sticker price of $33,000 adjusted for inflation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Taurus_%28second_generati...

I don't think it would even feel safe to drive at all compared to what we have got use to with modern cars. It broke down 3 times while I had it and stranded me on the road. No cell phone of course to call anyone.

These were the mythic "good ol days".