A Network-shared global clipboard?

Even with all the Big Brother monitoring on the corporate LAN these days, you would expect that an item such as your own computers Windows Clipboard would be safe.

This was far from the true today when a system irregularity was found. An irregularity, yes, but a feature that was working as designed. You may be surprised to find that our computers clipboards developed some type of network-aware sharedness. What this meant was that when a person placed something in the clipboard, it was being made available to other users on the LAN, and appearing when a paste function was used.

An example of this occurring, is when one user was using the copy and paste function, but ending up pasting an email from a colleagues PC into her Microsoft CRM case. We narrowed this down to the VMware virtual machine.

When a user has a VMware session open, and places an item on the clipboard on their local PC, a copy is made available to the local machine. Now, anyone subsequently using that same VM session may inject (for want of a better word) that clipboard content into their local PC by using the paste option. Obviously, timing is a major factor in whether the user gets clipboard contents intended for somebody else.

With the help of ISHelp (Outsource IT), we (Read Alan Murray) narrowed this down and Alan advised the team of an option to disable this 'feature'. My clipboard will never feel safe again.

Useless Information: During the American revolution, many brides used to wear the colour red instead of white as a symbol of rebellion.