
Ask HN: Is Dumpster Diving still a thing? What are some modern resources? - rman666
Dumpster Diving used to be all the rage in information security for finding discarded but useful equipment and “interesting” information. I don’t see much about it any more, but people are no doubt just as careless today as they were in the past. Thoughts?
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wsh
Several trends make scavenging less attractive than it once was:

• There won’t be as much information. With the shift to e-mail and online
documentation, there are fewer interesting paper documents, and the ones that
remain, when no longer needed, are more likely to be shredded by the trucks
that have become an everyday sight in business districts.

• There won’t be as much equipment. Governments require e-waste to be kept out
of the normal solid waste stream, and online markets such as eBay have made it
more rewarding to sell surplus items to asset recovery companies, rather than
just throwing them away.

• You’re more likely to get caught. Low-cost, high-quality video surveillance,
with automated and remote monitoring, has made it routine to cover trash
rooms, dumpster enclosures, and similar areas that might, in the past, have
been monitored only at the most sensitive facilities.

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alltakendamned
I'd say it's been replaced by scouring for S3 buckets with bad permissions.

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giantg2
I think there's a lot of carelessness/ignorance with small companies as it
pertains to info sec. They simply don't have the budget to contract out the
security work, create effective policies (experts in-house or consulting),
enforce those polices, etc.

I think most bigger companies have a lot of protocols and contract
professionals to remove and remediate old documents or equipment. They are
also more likely to have physical security preventing access to the dumpsters.

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d33lio
Shared workspaces and offices like WeWork seem to pose the biggest threats to
"common infosec" but mostly in the form of digital dumpster diving.

Although, the WeWork office the startup I work for occupied in NYC pre-covid
had multiple bottles of hand sanitizer stolen before our lease expired this
month. That being said, even with a private key-card secured office these
spaces are laughably insecure.

