The filenames are clearly timestamps. i.e.
170901_1554.mp3 would be
Sept 1, 2017 3:54PM
Were you able to confirm that the laptop was on and present during the recorded conversations?
If you can confirm that some of the conversations occurred when the laptop was not on or present, then it would suggest that there is some kind of bug present that was secretly uploading to the laptop, for later retrieval.
Unfortunately, this would probably be government agency surveillance, rather than random malware. Just look at what happened to poor Mr. Kraft.
I don’t think there is any way to track this any further, however.
It might be worth scanning the drives of your desktop PC from a trusted linux boot CD, and see if there are other suspicious files there.
Non-US date format. Software probably written by someone outside of the US. So my guess would be NOT a "big name" program or one that's part of bloatware on the laptop.
Yeah, they sure do look like timestamps. I have a program that I used daily to record Sirius Patriot programs with a scheduler, and it writes files that look like that.
However, if this is an actual filename from a laptop purchase as new a week ago, I doesn't seem logical that to have a timestamp from 2017. Perhaps it was imported from a backup when the OP retrieved files from his recently-deceased machine.
I'd wonder if the OP has been able to discern the 'freshness' of these conversations in which he recognizes his voice. It ought to be easy enough to say 'I remember talking about that the other day'. For some mundane conversation from September of 2017, not so much...
First thing I'd do -- after running Malwarebytes and another security tool or two -- would be to locate where these files are stored on the machine.
“The filenames are clearly timestamps. i.e.
170901_1554.mp3 would be
Sept 1, 2017 3:54PM”
How did you convert that?! I’m so excited. I need to save and print some text message conversations. I’ve saved the conversations, which are .VZM files. I change the extension to .TXT or .DOC, and I get a big mess on the screen, which I can go through and “clean up”, via search-and-replace, adding paragraphs, etc. BUT the dates and times aren’t there except in this numerical format.
I think I could save the files as .CSV, and format the cells/columns with this info. I would just need to know the format to use.
There is no way this is a “government agency surveillance” unless it was Deputy Barney Fife.
I would think the most likely explanation is that the computer had a dictation recording app that was set to auto-record.