Why YSK: It appears several Lemmy Instances are flagged as suspicious and at least 1 instance intentionally using the name of ransomware. A couple of the big enterprise monitoring suites (Fortiguard, ZScaler) will flag your account and may end up with you being pulled into an office for an explanation, or worse.
TL;DR: Keep browsing to your local instance at work for now.
This is why we have a Palo Alto firewall. All internet traffic from a single PC being tunneled over a VPN would set off some flags and quickly be remedied. Good, modern firewalls can do what are essentially “man-in-the-middle” attacks to snoop on traffic. If this was prevented by a VPN it will be immediately known.
“You should be using a VPN” is not universal advice. It’s not up to you when you do not own the internet connection you are using.
Its worth noting, you cant actually MITM most traffic without device acess. To MITM my lemmy traffic, you would need either a copy of the certificate and private key of for example lemmy.world, which they would never willingly provide, or you would need to get a valid certificate from a CA for lemmy.world, which you could never get without verifying ownership of the domain.
If you are using a company owned device to browse Lemmy, then 100% they can very easily install a custom Root CA and make their own certificates, and you should assume all your traffic is monitored. But if they allow BYOB or for your phone to be on the network, then they would be unable to see that traffic without you being able to tell, because you would get certificate errors.
But if they allow you to install a VPN, then just use TOR with a TOR bridge and you wouldnt have issues, because they cant tell its VPN / TOR traffic akaik
So if you were, say, using a VPN on your personal phone at work on their internet, would you also get in trouble?
If it’s a personal device, at worst they would see you are using a VPN and maybe ask what’s up with that, but they can’t mitm you on your own device.
Why would you join your phone to the company wifi? Mobile data is cheap (at least where I am). I’ve never joined my personal phone to an employer’s wifi. At least not in the last five or so years.
Where I am, I’m on prepaid. It’s not cost-effective to pay for a full plan (when eg.: I already have internet at home).
cell reception is spotty where I work and there’s a guest WiFi option and they allow VPN. works Wi-Fi works for my use case.
True. I wouldn’t, I was just curious.
Most probably not. Unless you’ve installed custom root certificate provided by them. (which you most probably didn’t)
Unless you’re handing your phone over and letting them root it, they almost certainly are not MITMing your traffic. At best, they can see you’re using a VPN. If they are able to snoop your traffic, either your VPN is absolutely shit, or you changed some setting you shouldn’t have and fucked yourself.