ClusterConifertree wrote:
Are companies able to communicate and see other devices on home networks?
Apps can request access to a local network yes, as many apps would be less useful without access to, for instance, printers or external displays.
Reviewing this thread, it’s not clear if there’s even provisioning happening here, past a stale certificate from what looks to be an MDM vendor, and a Microsoft Google account display from somewhere else, and an entirely benign and default Directory Utility display.
In other threads, there have been apparent cases of folks that have purchased pre-provisioned iPhone, iPad, Mac equipment (whether that was from a fraudulent sale or from an improperly-decommissioned device?), and there are certainly ways to get provisioning profiles loaded, and not the least of which are some semi-common scams that claim the target user needs to also accept and have the profile loaded for using some app.
If there’s been a breach sufficient to load a management profile, then the usual response is to wipe and reload with current versions and to change all passwords to new and unique values, migrating only documents and preferences and not apps, and related security- and privacy-focused steps. Loading a rogue profile is not a “hey, cute” breach, it’s a security-catastrophic breach.
Neither macOS, nor iOS, nor iPadOS are invulnerable to breaches and exploits, though breaches of current versions without user involvement—phishing scams, shoulder surfing, gaslighting, etc—are fairly rare. If you’re a higher-profile target of some organization with a whole lot of money, sure, but securing against that is also a whole ‘nother discussion. And those more expensive exploits don’t typically use profiles, from what little has been seen. Profiles… are usually either sketchy equipment purchases, or decommissioning mistakes by the seller or a previous employer, or jailbreaks or phishing, or are otherwise and regrettably loaded by user.
As for these threads… Posting normal, benign, default displays from, for instance, Directory Utility, is counterproductive for claims of breaches. Same holds for posting great swaths of log file chatter, as has happened in other threads around here.
Posting normal log chatter or normal displays and “am I breached?” is sufficiently open-ended to be unanswerable, to be blunt. Not past a generic “probably not”. Proving a negative is… difficult.
If you’re interested in learning more about the operations and internals, the new OS X Internals book (search for “newosxbook”) is a good start. For security, that’s a bit tougher when starting out, but detection is also heavily dependent on knowing what is and is not “normal”, as well as knowing which sorts of breaches are more common, and those that are less common.
