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I recently worked for a customer that showed me that all their network cables are visible. Indeed, cables were never drawn inside walls, conduits or trunks. Instead, they were "hung" on poles close to the ceiling. If a cable needed to pass through a wall, the hole was way larger than required, allowing a lot of light to pass around the cable. These measure were allegedly taken to make it very difficult for anyone to do network wiretapping inside their premises, without this being immediately noticed.

Does anyone have a clue what security standard they followed?

My understanding is that they were trying to avoid this kind of attack.

schroeder
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user1202136
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  • Were they following a standard? Did they work in a regulated industry that might have it's own unique requirements? – schroeder May 28 '20 at 12:02
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    I'm truly not sure how effective this would be against *wiretapping*. It's not like you can install a vampire tap on CAT 5. "Poles" are also a strange thing to use. Cable runs are more standard. All-in-all, I have a lot of questions about the practice you describe. – schroeder May 28 '20 at 12:05
  • @schroeder Yes, they worked in a regulated industry that had its unique requirements, but I don't know what industry or what regulations they followed, hence my original question. Having been a network engineer, I also found it weird to see network cables "hanging" on the wall, but I do have to admit that it was easy to see that no wiretapping occurred. I guess it would not be too difficult to train the janitor to carefully cut a CAT6, and add a punch down block, like illustrated here: https://www.lastbreach.com/blog/physical-wiretapping-for-beginners – user1202136 May 28 '20 at 14:16
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    In 10+ years of pentesting I've never seen or heard anything like this... – Pedro May 28 '20 at 14:36
  • OMG, the noise on the line if someone did what is described in that photo... – schroeder May 28 '20 at 14:46

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