FWIW, this isn’t to do with me personally at all, I’m not looking to do anything dodgy here, but this came up as a theoretical question about remote work and geographical security, and I realised I didn’t know enough about this (as an infosec noob)
Presuming:
- an employer provides the employee with their laptop
- with security software installed that enables snooping and wiping etc and,
- said employer does not want their employee to work remotely from within some undesirable geographical locations
How hard would it be for the employee to fool their employer and work from an undesirable location?
I personally figured that it’s rather plausible. Use a personal VPN configured on a personal router and then manually switch off wifi, bluetooth and automatic time zone detection. I’d presume latency analysis could be used to some extent?? But also figure two VPNs, where the second one is that provided by/for the employer, would disrupt that enough depending on the geographies involved?
What else could be done on the laptop itself? Surreptitiously turn on wiki and scan? Can there be secret GPSs? Genuinely curious!
When I use a VPN I am disconnected from anything relating to my companies network. Includes email. They use microsoft services.
When you use the VPN are you using/opening the VPN on the device itself instead of a dedicated wireless router configured with the VPN instead?
If so, that’s your problem, otherwise it’s like the other commenter said, they’re probably detecting a common VPN IP if you’re using a common service. Grab a cheap VPS in your desired location and setup a VPN server and connect to that instead
Yep, on the device itself. Thanks!
Or spin up an ec2 instance yourself and route everything from there.
Amazon can get you fixed ip for cheap.