Imagine the following scene: three senior system architects from EnkriptBul Ltd. having dinner in the jewel of the city – the restaurant “Le Ciel Rouge” with a panoramic view of the night boulevard. They order salmon tartare with truffle, glazed wild rabbit fillet and a bottle of Château Pétrus 2015. In between sips of wine and quiet jazz, they begin to “unload” for the day:
– “Today we finally changed the default root password on the new Zero-Trust gateway – it was ‘Admin1234’, now it’s ‘Encrypt2025!”
– “Ugh, not to mention we haven’t closed 3389 yet for that old Windows 2012 R2 guy who keeps the backup of customer NDAs.”

At the next table, half-hidden by the evening light, sits a beautiful woman in an elegant black cocktail dress, who squats and records everything on her phone. The following week, the company discovers that the entire archive was downloaded through the open RDP port, and rumors of “poor security” spread among customers. The cost? Tens of thousands of euros for investigation, lawyers, PR and – most importantly – irreparable reputational damage.

What happens

This article explains why it’s the careless conversations in a fancy restaurant that are becoming the low-hanging fruit for the social engineer and how to protect your company.

Why Michelin-starred halls are a ‘goldmine’ for malicious actors

• Dimmed lights and background piano – people talk more freely.
• Wine – brings down protective barriers.
• Repetitive habits – always book the same VIP table at 8:30pm, which makes it easier to monitor.
• Luxury Wi-Fi network – at the same time as the auditory channel, a malicious person can “eavesdrop” on your traffic.

Which are the most frequently leaked “pearls”

• Internal server names and IP ranges (“vpn-backup-01 is 10.0.3.17”).
• Technology stacks (“Our new Jenkins is on jenkins-sandbox, no 2FA yet”).
• Backup schemes (“The full backup is uploaded to S3 bucket ‘encrypt-backups-jul2025’, region frankfurt”).
• Passwords (yes, it still happens) or at least a hint of the scheme (“We use a fixed prefix + the year”).
• Physical security information (“Our access cards are old HID Prox – can be cloned in 20 minutes”).

What the step-by-step attack looks like

• Step 1: Intelligence – the malicious party identifies employees via LinkedIn, restaurant badges or laptop stickers.
• Step 2: Physical observation – “accidentally” sits at a nearby table, turns on a tape recorder, or simply records notes.
• Step 3: Correlation – gathers the fragments and builds an overall picture of the infrastructure.
• Step 4: Exploit – uses the detected data for access, phishing or even physical intrusion.
• Step 5: Concealment – Erases the trail while the company does not yet suspect it has been compromised.

Examples of incidents

• “Catering case” – an accountant for a SaaS company tells a restaurant that “new client ‘OnlyBank’ paid 120,000 euros upfront”. That evening, the malicious person sends a phishing email from a spoofed domain onlybank-legal.com and manages to transfer the money to an offshore company.
• “Root-access sandwich” – a DevOps engineer describes to a colleague how they migrated the base to Aurora and that “there’s still no AWS key rotation.” After 48 hours, a stranger downloads 2 TB of credit logs.

Practical protection measures

• Never share technical details in a public place.
• Use code words or abstract descriptions (“the server with the cat” instead of “SQL-PROD-03”).
• Clean table policy – no laptops, papers or badges on the restaurant table.
• Sensitive Conversation Area – designate a “quiet room” in the office that is easier to control than any outside location.
• Habit rotation – change the time and place of dinner to break predictability.
• Physical shield – use screen filters and privacy-stickers for laptops and phones to keep the screen out of the side.
• Learning through scenarios – do internal “red-team” exercises where employees are “bugged” in a cafeteria and then the findings are discussed.
• Rapid response – introduce a ‘security hotline’ (e.g. Signal chat) where anyone can report suspicious behaviour.

What to do if you suspect a leak

• Change all mentioned passwords, keys, tokens immediately.
• Scan logs for unusual IPs or time windows.
• Let the legal and PR team know – transparency helps more than obfuscation.
• Do a post-mortem and include the lesson in the next training.

Conclusion

The most effective attacks often begin not with an 0-day exploit, but with a glass of Grand Cru and a sentence, “Yesterday we finally closed CVE-2023-…”. In the world of information security, every word has a price; in fine dining, it sometimes costs the entire business. Make it so that the next time your colleagues order filet mignon with truffle, the only thing that “leaks” is the butter flavor – not your server’s root password.

Be vigilant, be discreet and never underestimate the power of… silence.

In order to ensure that your team is well prepared and informed about the best practices for information security, we at NIT – New Internet Technologies offer specialized trainings that you can find on our website store.nit.bg. By investing in the knowledge and skills of your employees, you are not only protecting your business, but also building a safer and more sustainable working environment.