Following Layoffs, Automattic Employees Discover Leak-Catching Watermarks (404media.co)
- Reference: 0177046095
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/04/16/1959227/following-layoffs-automattic-employees-discover-leak-catching-watermarks
- Source link: https://www.404media.co/automattic-wordpress-p2-watermark-leakers/
> As part of the company's months-long obsession with catching employees leaking internal developments to the press, staff at Wordpress parent company Automattic recently [1]noticed individually-unique watermarks on internal sites , according to employees who spoke to 404 Media. Automattic added the watermarks to an internal employee communications platform called P2. P2 is a WordPress product other workplaces can also use. There are hundreds of P2 sites across teams at Automattic alone; many are team-specific, but some are company-wide for announcements. The watermarks in Automattic's P2 instance are nearly invisible, rendered as a pattern overlaid on the site's white page backgrounds. Zooming in or manually changing the background color reveals the pattern. If, for example, a journalist published a screenshot leaked to them that was taken from P2, Automattic could theoretically identify the employee who shared it.
>
> In October, as part of a series of buyout offers meant to test employee's loyalty to his leadership, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg issued a threat for anyone speaking to the press, saying they should "exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance." Earlier this month, the company laid off nearly 300 people. [...] It's not clear when the watermarks started appearing on P2, and Automattic has not responded to a request for comment. But Mullenweg has been [2]warring with web hosting platform WP Engine -- and as the story has developed, seemingly with his own staff -- since last year. [...] One Automattic employee told me they don't think anyone is shocked by the watermarking, considering Mullenweg's ongoing campaign to find leakers, but that it's still adding to the uncertain, demoralized environment at the company. "Can't help but feel even more paranoid now," they said.
[1] https://www.404media.co/automattic-wordpress-p2-watermark-leakers/
[2] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/10/1757231/automattic-slashes-wordpressorg-support-in-battle-with-wp-engine
Watermarks are easily removed (Score:3)
If you are aware they are there. Hence the most critical thing is to hide them well. Apparently that did not happen here.
Protip: Export as txt (cut & paste into notepad), run a spell-checker and a whitespace-normalizer on it and do a careful reading of the text. Nothing will be left. To be extra sure, get several sources of the docunent with likly different watermarks and compare to identify the differences and hence the watermark.
As the incident with "Reality Winner" and The Intercept shows, even people that really should know better do not know to do this basic sanitization though.
Re: Watermarks are easily removed (Score:2)
But then it's just text, not evidence. I guess even any digital image is not valid evidence anymore in this brave new world though. Just seems more like evidence.
Re: (Score:2)
It is just pixels before. Just as much or as little evidence value...
Re: (Score:2)
> But then it's just text, not evidence. I guess even any digital image is not valid evidence anymore in this brave new world though. Just seems more like evidence.
Unless you get multiple independent sources saying so and so said this and that in the company wide email.
Re: (Score:3)
> Export as txt (cut & paste into notepad), run a spell-checker and a whitespace-normalizer on it and do a careful reading of the text. Nothing will be left. To be extra sure, get several sources of the docunent with likly different watermarks and compare to identify the differences and hence the watermark.
Multiple documents are key since the watermark may be something entirely grammatical. Like Oxford comma or not, word substitutions (synonyms). Perhaps hexdumps and comparing those in case there is a "letter" composed from multiple unicode elements, where multiple modifiers appear in a different order.
Re: (Score:2)
If you suspect the other side is compentent, definitely. But they do not seem to be here. The watermark from the story is probably FUD and designed to be seen and make people afraid.
At this point... (Score:2)
If you're going to leak something, feed it to an LLM and ask for a restatement, then save screenshots of the original for trial.
Restatement may work no better than translation (Score:1)
> If you're going to leak something, feed it to an LLM and ask for a restatement, then save screenshots of the original for trial.
Its an old joke, and it is about translation not restatement, but I think the joke might apply here too.
English/Russian translation software is being tested.
The English text "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" is translated into Russian.
The Russian text is then translated into English and the result is "The vodka is strong but the meat is spoiled."
Re: This isn't watermarking. (Score:3)
the phrase "watermarking" has been used for this exact application for decades.
Old-school photocopier "watermark" (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in the day when copiers were analog, I knew a company that put unique etchings on the glass of all of their copiers.
This way, at least they had an idea of what site or building the leaked document came from.
Re: (Score:2)
I thought that's what the yellow dots were for
how about this whataboutism? (Score:2)
can watermarks be eliminated by copy & paste? or take a screenshot while the watermark is invisible then zoom in on the screenshot to see if its gone
Automatic employees? (Score:2)
So the age of AI employees is already here, apparently!
Prediction (Score:2)
Automattic will have a hard time hiring competent engineers going forward. I'd bet they're on a whole bunch of "do not apply" lists. Although, if you want to have some fun, respond to a recruiter for them with a watermarked response along the lines of "no way in hell".
Re: (Score:2)
They are talking about web sites, "a pattern overlaid on the site’s white page backgrounds." View it with a text browser, eg lynx, and save the text. Alternately: most browsers let you 'view source'.
However: if the watermark software is any good they will have thought of that and have something to stop it.
Can anyone tell us how it woks ?
Re: Easy fix (Score:2)
I think you're giving them too much credit. All their software is crap, so this watermark thing must be crap too. Note that some evil developer implemented this for them. The entire software industry has lost its ethics.
Re: Easy fix (Score:2)
Watermarking is damn near ancient technology. They're not even using well-hidden watermarks. At a minimum they could require you to do an FFT or something to produce something readable.
It's amazing to me that any journalist would directly publish any leaked data. That's incredibly stupid. Even leaking the plain text is risky, as you can "watermark" any document by subtly re-ordering words and sentences, inserting typos, etc. which would tell you at least what office the document was leaked from. I'm tempted
Fun stuff, even in text documents (Score:3)
> Can anyone tell us how it woks ?
For text documents, especially when viewed with proportionally spaced fonts. You can do simple things like add a space between words. Is the extra space a typo or a personalized tell? Any typo might be a tell.
Remove an Oxford comma. "1, 2, and 3" becomes "1, 2 and 3".
Another trick is to use a unicode character that renders the same.
Is that 'A' in Cyrillic, numerically U+0410? [1]https://www.compart.com/en/uni... [compart.com]
Or is in Latin, U+0041? [2]https://www.compart.com/en/uni... [compart.com]
What about file metadata, a d
[1] https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+0410
[2] https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+0041
Re: (Score:3)
Well at least we know on slashdot we're safe from that sort of watermarking