On 03/02/2021 16.44, gumb wrote:
On 03/02/2021 11:21, Carlos E. R. wrote:
You are not talking of the power, electricity mains, socket?
No I mean the telecoms socket, but the information communicated to me was 'draining the power', which sounds like nonsense. Apparently, unnecessary wiring complexity was discovered due to the existence of other, disused connected sockets in the property, so they can only mean draining some bandwidth, but I think either the engineer was trying to dumb down their terminology or it was just a dumb engineer!
It can actually mean "power", as in miliwatts. The signal goes to several sockets, so you can get at least reflections. Maybe there are old phones still connected, so there is some reduction in the "power" you get.
Assuming they did not touch the computer itself, the quick answer is "no". This is the type of attack that encryption is designed to defend you from.
However, video/audio: not all protocols are sufficiently secure. Some do not encrypt at all, others the encryption is managed by the provider of the conferencing service, so you you have to trust them... however, these people do not need access to the socket: they already have silent, transparent access.
I think the elongated short answer is no, except in some exceptional specific circumstances where placement of a bugging device could be used to gain credentials via some other way (i.e. listening, unique key sound fingerprinting, etc.)
No reason to be mildly neurotic about it, and no reason to stop being mildly neurotic about it.
:-D -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.2 x86_64 at Telcontar)