North Korean fake job interview led to $6.3B Binance heist (theregister.com)

558 pointsby smalltech10 hours ago343 comments

gandreani 8 hours ago

A lot of people are focusing on how irresponsible the engineer was about using the work computer. That's obviously an issue but the bigger failure mode to me is the Engineer C's container deployment token.

That's a huge red-flag. In a company of this size, the deployments should be via CI only. CI isn't just to increase the speed and reliability of deployments but also to provide a clean room to build the software! Even if it's a token that was copied and pasted temporarily, the systems in place should not have to require this type of 1. copy 2. paste 3. remember-to-delete the token from my PC.

Also, Binance should be paying for intrusion testing. Better to pay a trusted company to do this kind of thing instead of letting North Korea show you how it's done. I don't think this exact exploit path would have been found but I bet the intrusion testing would have figured out another way to use Engineer C's token.

AlexITC 8 hours ago

I have saw companies doing social engineering as part of their intrution testing, I imagine fake interviews are (or will become) part of these.

dylan604 8 hours ago

It'll be hard to time a job opening receiving interviews to line up with intrusion tests in a way that people would not be on guard against it in a way not normal.

philipwhiuk 8 hours ago

Fake interviews would be a huge time sink and probably piss off your staff.

hirako2000 8 hours ago

They don't have to respond. It gives employers an even stronger signal they should be kept right?

Aurornis 7 hours ago

Using pentesting to also test employee loyalty is a great way to get the entire company to hate working there.

optimalsolver 7 hours ago

Which is why it's going to happen.

solyin 4 hours ago

Only if your manager is an incompetent moron.

Which is also why we, collectively, as an industry needs to not put up with that. It's easy for me to say from the comfort of it not being my job on the line, that if this happens to anybody they should quit and then name and shame the company, but a competent security team is going to have the idea of doing a fake phishing interview and then not do it because of how morale destroying that would be. The security awareness team sending fake phishing emails are embarrassing enough.

Aurornis 7 hours ago

I think it will remain uncommon. I agree it would be a good test, but companies and employees alike get very angry when pentesting gets too close to sensitive subjects.

Anyone who fell for it would not only get in trouble for poor security practice, they would reveal that they were job searching. That opens an entire can of worms that creates problems beyond the pentest. This also angers other employees who see it as a double-trap being sprung on employees.

Another major problem is that responsible employees who accept the fake interview but then use their personal laptop to do the interview will have their personal laptop compromised by the pentesters. Responsible testers will immediately abort, but some will try to use the personal laptop to pivot deeper which is a huge ick. It’s also really bad if the company is compromising personal laptops of people who are doing the right thing (switching to personal gear for interviews).

quaffcode 7 hours ago

The pentesters wouldn't have to actually pwn a laptop, just getting the employee to download and run anything could go in a report without having the file actually be malicious.

NikolaNovak 6 hours ago

Would they have legal right to do that, out of curiosity?

Hired oentest has company permission to do stuff on company property. I do not imagine they have right to do so to personal property.

manphone 6 hours ago

Absolutely not. There is literally no framework, which would give you the right to exploit an employee’s personal laptop, that’s just cyber crime.

realo 6 hours ago

Then that is something the pentesters cannot do, but malicious actors will do.

Game over.

PeterisP 2 hours ago

What pentesters can do, should do, and often do is simply start the test from a workstation that is given to them - you assume a successful social engineering attack as the starting point, and test whether your process and technical controls can properly limit the impact of such a compromise without trying to replicate the actual social engineering step and the associated disruption to the targeted employees.

Taking over that first engineer's workstation shouldn't ever have resulted in $6.3B of damages. I would consider it reasonable if those privileges could be abused (by e.g. the same engineer intentionally) to cause $6.3M of damages and the rest would be mitigated or prevented; so for this incident we could say that 0.1% of the impact was caused by the initial compromise of that workstation and 99.9% of the losses were caused by all the other failures - so it's effective for any pentest to focus on the latter part, ignore the social engineering and phishing part (since you can't really eliminate it anyway - unlike many other flaws) and assume initial compromise as a starting point.

ShinyLeftPad 6 hours ago

Companies don't try to set up job interviews to test their employees loyalty?

0cf8612b2e1e 5 hours ago

Everyone has their price. It is foolish to think that most people would not leave for better title/pay/job alignment/whatever.

ShinyLeftPad 4 hours ago

Well also to test that they don't just casually drop corporate secrets...

skeeter2020 5 hours ago

fake interviews might be excessive but lots of companies send tempting phishing emails as part of the secops, then both collect org-level stats and educate (or shame depending on your take) the employee for getting duped.

fc417fc802 34 minutes ago

> responsible employees who accept the fake interview but then use their personal laptop to do the interview will have their personal laptop compromised by the pentesters.

If your laptop is successfully compromised by the pentesters then pretty much by definition you weren't being responsible. Though I agree that pentesters going after personal devices is ethically dubious.

thomc 7 hours ago

Sometimes called "Full Spectrum Attack Simulation" where initial entry can include physical access or spear phishing. They can span months in elapsed time (not effort) so as to be more realistic. However there are still ethical and safety constraints and even phishing may not be able to use the (effective) technique of stressing the recipient too much or of course blackmail or coercing. So I think fake interviews may not be allowed in many cases, to protect the employees.

shepherdjerred 7 hours ago

Is that even legal? Wouldn’t a fake job interview be, in a sense, tricking you into taking time off and working without pay?

nradov 6 hours ago

Legality would be very jurisdiction dependent. It might be illegal in most developed Western countries, depending on the exact facts of the case. I suspect it wouldn't be illegal in China — unless the trick happened to hit a ranking Communist Party member.

phyzome an hour ago

I think it would be legal but unethical -- unless you also then gave the employee substantial compensation for their time and opportunity cost.

FitchApps 5 hours ago

And you never, ever, ever install software as part of the interview. Decline and hang up if they're asking you to install stuff. Visiting websites - maybe but even that unless it's a well known website I wouldn't go there but download and install stuff, hells no

cldellow 4 hours ago

"fork this repo and fix this bug" is a common job interview request, isn't it?

For many build chains, that involves implicitly installing software.

fc417fc802 25 minutes ago

Such toolchains are dumpster fires whose use invites supply chain attacks. They should never have gained mainstream acceptance and should never be run outside of a sandbox.

That said I wouldn't trust a compiler to be hardened against malicious input and anyway you presumably need to run the output so all of that should be happening in a hardened sandbox regardless.

zaphirplane 3 hours ago

Hmm like building an node project, actually any project can have a dependency on a made up libraries that does the exploitation or even the project itself as made infamous by chrome extensions

qurren 2 hours ago

I fully agree with this.

If you ever meet with Alibaba for any reason they'll ask you to download their conference software. Unfortunately most people in the China ecosystem don't have the guts to say no and will just gleefully install any .exe thrown at them.

benoau 8 hours ago

> Even if it's a token that was copied and pasted temporarily, the systems in place should not have to require this type of 1. copy 2. paste 3. remember-to-delete the token from my PC.

One of the first things I did in my last job was shift processes like this off my team's computers, aside from the security ramifications all it takes is one dumb mistake, one up-arrow too many, one didn't-read-the-whole-line, and now you're doing something to production by accident!

hirako2000 8 hours ago

I also did that, for a team deploying smart contract on chain from local.

It took a couple months to get the pipeline out of their laptop.

Worth it, yes, as we found interesting things in there which explained why they were so reluctant to deploy upgrades.

pjc50 8 hours ago

> as we found interesting things in there which explained why they were so reluctant to deploy upgrades

.. backdoors which enabled the dev to deploy exploits of their own which wouldn't be visible through CI?

hirako2000 5 hours ago

No, rather a particular environment with monkey patched libraries, alias for various versions of compliers, and dozens of env variables that happen to work or not work well with the desired config.

jacekm 7 hours ago

TBH CI does not prevent this kind of mistakes. I've seen people triggering the wrong CI pipeline.

steve1977 6 hours ago

I guess people triggering the pipeline is already part of the problem

nightpool 3 hours ago

What sorts of processes related to secret storage were you able to shift off of team computers? From my perspective, if I need to get e.g. an API key from Twitter and put it into my prod environment, i have to be doing that with my computer somehow. There's still millions of different types of secrets that need meat puppets to shuffle them around.

nutjob2 an hour ago

> There's still millions of different types of secrets that need meat puppets to shuffle them around.

Sure, but those meat puppets shouldn't be developers, they should be administrators, using proper procedures.

Separation of powers seems so fundamental yet also so totally ignored these days.

panicinducer 7 hours ago

Nobody in the entire company should have access to move $billions in crypto, much less a random engineer, even if they're part of the deploy process.

ffsm8 6 hours ago

I mean sure, but as long as you can deploy directly any permissions models are meaningless for an attacker? They can just be removed.

Quinner 6 hours ago

They had controls in place to prevent large transfers, so the attackers structured it as a lot of small transfers very quickly

long-time-first 6 hours ago

I think they did that in Superman 3

jMyles 6 hours ago

This isn't a mundane detail, Michael!

ForHackernews 6 hours ago

Be your own IRM 4.26.13!

PeeMcGee 6 hours ago

A disgruntled employee wouldn't do the exact same thing?

neutronicus 6 hours ago

That's the plot of Office Space!

wahern 5 hours ago

Also Superman III, which predates it and presumably was well known to the writers. But I have an inkling the scheme and it's infamy go back much further. (Precious metal coin clipping/debasement?) It's one of those ethical questions, like a pauper stealing bread, or thought experiments, like "what if reality is just a dream" that many if not most people encounter during their formative years. Per usual, though, the chasm between theory and application (even just identifying real world potential when it matters) is the toughest one to cross.

vondur 5 hours ago

They also mention that in the movie.

wolfi1 3 hours ago

there's even a Peter Ustinov film from the 60s

otterley an hour ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics

yobananaboy 6 hours ago

Not just that! The EIP-7702 delegation to make the wallet into a smart contract bypassed all of the controls that they had in place on the signer. It's wild that they didn't have a system in place to stop it from signing that transaction type.

tennysont 2 hours ago

From my rough understanding, this seems like the main exploit. It seems like the machine with access to the wallet key was presented with a crazy EIP-7702 transaction and signed it (which effectively owned its wallet in a single transaction)[1]. Without knowing their security model, it seems like biggest trust boundary should be between that signing machine and everything else.

[1] The fact that the needed to sign 50 of these transactions to solve a race condition seems like an implementation detail

SpaceNoodled 5 hours ago

OK, so nobody else has seen Superman III?

Animats 4 hours ago

Nope.

RHSeeger 4 hours ago

It is such a weird combination of "I enjoyed this movie" and "this really isn't a good superman movie"

wolfi1 3 hours ago

at that time I was not old enough to see it

burningChrome 4 hours ago

If they did and didn't account for a simple scenario like this happening and built in roadblocks and friction to prevent it from happening? Then it would stand to reason their entire EIS team should be fired.

The fact nobody thought of this is pretty staggering.

littlecranky67 4 hours ago

It is hard to imagine they lost 6.3$bn and are not firing people...

Betelbuddy 3 hours ago

They just spent 6.3$bn to train them....

stinkbeetle an hour ago

> They had controls in place to prevent large transfers, so the attackers structured it as a lot of small transfers very quickly

lol that's the worst control I've ever heard.

melenaboija 31 minutes ago

Well, then they need another control that prevents “small transfers very quickly” happening, I guess.

fhn an hour ago

most employees shouldn't be able to touch the funds at all except a handful and probably require supervisor verification (dual factor authentication).

WesolyKubeczek 7 hours ago

What if I plant a hook on the engineer’s laptop that will slightly modify their commits in such a way that eventually I smuggle malicious code over? First, exfiltrate the code over to me, learn from previous commits, start poisoning. Stamped by the CI, no less. In the days of slop PRs thousands of lines each shouldn’t be even too hard.

The point is that at some point you do need to open the door and let the code in.

stickfigure 6 hours ago

The company should require both automated and human review of PRs. Mine does.

WesolyKubeczek 4 hours ago

"too long, LGTM, now buzz off"

baal80spam 3 hours ago

Well, that's still a human review. If something breaks, you (as in: this reviewer) is at least partly responsible.

mianos 3 hours ago

This is the standard at most professional companies but it's now becoming a problem due to AI and undisciplined people submitting 10,000 lines MRs.

zaphirplane 3 hours ago

mine mandates no security bugs in PR :)

zaphirplane 3 hours ago

Wouldn’t most companies worth exploiting run some static analysis in the ci cd

eptcyka 7 hours ago

No such thing as deleting secrets. You decommission them and replace them. Deleting them off disk is impractical to do, at least sufficiently.

suzzer99 7 hours ago

100% this. I can deploy to our sandbox environment directly, but only our CI/CD has the permissions to build/deploy to our master environment. And the stuff I work on is 1000x less impactful than $billions in crypto!

jandrese 3 hours ago

Maybe that second engineer who's laptop they were laser focused on was the CI/CD?

_heimdall 5 hours ago

I don't even leave deploy tokens on my laptop for personal side projects. It isn't difficult to setup CI deploys, if nothing else the extra upfront cost let's me be lazy and have a consistent deploy pipeline.

yubblegum 4 hours ago

The article says that a software engineer interviewed with the North Koreans and the NKs then gained access to engineer A's machine (which had the deployment token) and then finally passed that token to run on engineer C's machine (who apparently did deployments). They knew of the team makeup from their first (caught) attempt.

That unlettered (npi) engineer who downloaded and ran the interview software on his or her machine is what the human weak link here. Let's call them Engineer F. Seems like this person was specifically selected from the dev team.

burningChrome 4 hours ago

I've had this happen a few times getting interview requests from Indian recruiting firms. It sounded familiar. You go through a screening, then get passed onto the "code challenge" part. You have to download a GitHub file and then work on it, check it back in and push it so they can examine what you did.

Twice I scanned the file after downloading it to a sandbox and twice it found malware that would've been installed.

While this is by far the worst case of this happening, I've read at least a half dozen other accounts of recruiting companies attempting to install malware through the same process. I'm not saying the person should have known, but it's scary this is becoming more and more common.

fc417fc802 39 minutes ago

> I'm not saying the person should have known

This person definitely should have known. You don't download and run arbitrary binaries outside of a VM. At this point you don't even compile code from an untrusted source. This is the power user equivalent of falling for a phishing email.

saalweachter 31 minutes ago

One of my favorite stories from a security talk was the speaker recounting the surrealism of (while doing a forensic investigation of a security incident) watching the attacker read your internal documentation to try to figure out how the hell anything works mid-attack, and running into all the same pitfalls as your new employees.

bilekas 9 hours ago

Doing ANYTHING on a work issued laptop outside of your role is such a dumb idea for a litany of obvious reasons that I'm genuinely shocked people do it. Let alone participate in interviews for other companies on it.

jimmydoe 9 hours ago

lol maybe the employees wanted the company to see it.

xyzsparetimexyz 9 hours ago

Well so-rry but if you give me a macbook powerful enough to play cyberpunk 2077 on it, that's what I'm gonna do.

ranger_danger 9 hours ago

At least dual-boot a second OS that they have no control over.

LunaSea 8 hours ago

I highly doubt that a company will like that you dual boot their machines.

ranger_danger 4 hours ago

How would they ever know?

littlecranky67 4 hours ago

well if they don't manage it via some kind of MDM software, that would mean the employee is responsible for security on his own - at which point he might as well use his private laptop for work stuff.

ranger_danger 4 hours ago

The BIOS/firmware would have to be locked down and disallow USB/etc. booting, I don't think that's normally covered by MDM? Does UEFI even expose an ability to control that via software?

paxy 9 hours ago

In my last job we used Zoom for interviews. The link we sent would work in any web browser, but if the candidate was signed into a Zoom account on their computer we'd be able to see it. I'd say >70% of them were on their company account.

Even worse when you have to do stuff like screenshare or coding. I've had candidates share their screen and have obvious proprietary material in open windows. I've seen countless email inboxes and calendars. I've seen candidates do coding exercises using internal IDEs, dev environments and dev tools. I've had them talk – fully unprompted – about internal tech and unreleased projects. And I'm talking about Google, Meta, Amazon, Coinbase, Uber.

At this point I'm convinced that a large chunk of tech interviews are happening just to extract insider info from employees.

fusslo 9 hours ago

as a candidate it's pretty tough scheduling interviews past 5pm or on the weekends

Agingcoder 9 hours ago

What’s preventing you from using a personal laptop ?

dkdbejwi383 9 hours ago

Their current job, presumably

marssaxman 8 hours ago

How does that prevent you from using your personal laptop for a job interview?

It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose. It seems absurdly lazy, but I know that not everyone's life works like mine, so I would like to understand why this would be a real problem for people.

dylan604 8 hours ago

I had a really bad meeting one day that became the straw that broke the camel's back. When I went back to my desk, I saw an interesting job posting. I immediately fired up the company's copy of Word to draft up a resume, and used the company computer to send the email from my personal account. Less than a month later, I was working for the new company. It was done intentionally. I almost sent the resume via company email, but I really wanted to ensure I could access any response.

pcthrowaway 6 hours ago

If you work from the office, and they have tight security, they might frown upon bringing personal devices to connect to the internal network.

Also, some people might not have dev environments set up on their personal devices. Heck, a lot of people only use the internet through their smartphone, when they're not at work.

gorbachev 22 minutes ago

My employer allows personal computing equipment at work, but has a separate, completely isolated network they connect to. You're never allowed to connect them to the company network.

alyeska2 6 hours ago

> It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose

That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.

For 99% of people, the default would be "I'm going to join this Zoom meeting from the laptop I use all day long to join Zoom meetings, and I'm going to code using the laptop I use all day long to code".

Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer. Their personal laptop might be relatively underpowered and struggle to run all the required software efficiently during an interview. The issue becomes even more significant as more of the tools used require an account - you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service, so you just use the ones you're used to using every day.

JsonDemWitOster 5 hours ago

What I'm seeing here is that Binance has the IT culture of a SV start-up when it should have the IT culture of a bank. Sounds to me like a thug with a $10 wrench could've been just as effective.

> Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer...you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service...

I struggle to come up of even the most absurd interview scenario where the tool makes the difference especially in our field where if a FOSS tool is not standard, then there's a sufficiently powerful free tier (eg., Sublime, IntelliJ). Heck most remote interviews, they take you out of your tools completely and ask you to code on some shared browser-based editor.

> That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.

I'm calling HN SV start-up bias. Outside of the startup software eng'g industry, a lot of people exercise very good separation between work tools and personal tools. I know a lawyer, _who's the head of his own law firm,_ bring his personal laptop to the office just so he could purchase tickets during office hours.

I think this is also down to a few factors:

- SWEs are typically issued high-end machines in contrast to other professions whose standard issue is still 4GB (or 8GB, if you're lucky) RAM. For those professions buying a better personal laptop is a low bar to clear.

- SWEs are more efficient when they have admin access to their own machines. Though it begs the question that maybe some inefficiency would've been an acceptable tradeoff to $6.3B.

- SWE is one of the professions on the poster for the "Get paid good while working from Bali" lifestyle, wherein BYOD is implied, especially if you are freelancing.

alyeska2 4 hours ago

> I struggle to come up of even the most absurd interview scenario where the tool makes the difference

I had an interview recently where I'd initially planned to use my own machine, then gave up and just used my work computer.

I'm used to the whiteboarding/UML/flowchart software I use at work, so I either needed to pay for a personal subscription so I could use it in the interview or be forced to use some other software I'm not familiar with. I also didn't have a personal paid AI code tool, so again either pay for a personal one or just use the work Claude account. Also the webcam on my work laptop is substantially nicer than my personal laptop.

Also, critically, it doesn't matter. If IT or my manager had pinged me to ask "Did you do an interview at noon yesterday?" I would have said yes and then the only follow-up would have been them asking if it was a random thing or if I was actively looking.

I think IT (and I guess, lawyers) are probably the only people who care much about separating work and personal devices, just because they're prone to being aware of how much surveillance of the device can be happening. People in marketing/sales/whatever back office stuff will be logged into their personal Facebook, Netflix, iMessages, Email and bank and never consider that their keystrokes are being logged and screenshots are being taken.

fc417fc802 11 minutes ago

> I think IT (and I guess, lawyers)

IT is aware of surveillance. Lawyers have a legal responsibility to take all reasonable steps to safeguard confidential client information. A lawyer misusing a work device is probably roughly equivalent to a healthcare worker doing the same.

kakacik 2 hours ago

Common or uncommon, its extremely unprofessional. You know when you are dealing with a kid or with professional who actually wants to get hired and has some manners.

Sharing other's company secrets by mistake, using other company's resources in ways that are definitely forbidden - is this a person you really want to hire since they will behave the same in your company? Is this a person you want to give trust with some internals?

In market with 100s or applicants thats enough to disqualify anybody who actually needs an interview or two to get hired.

dylan604 8 hours ago

Hi Bob, why are you using your personal laptop at your desk instead of the company's laptop?

paxy 8 hours ago

If you are openly interviewing for other jobs from your desk I don't think which laptop you use is going to be anyone's concern.

steelframe 6 hours ago

I have never hidden the fact from any of my management in any of my companies that I interview with other companies on a semi-regular basis.

It reminds them that while I am a replaceable cog in their machine, I am also a cog that other machines would like to install given the right opportunity. And I am always aware of my current market value.

cricketsandmops 7 hours ago

Being an engineer I am surprised, but for normal staff its very common to not have a personal laptop. The most common request from layoffs or firings in my company has been a request to keep their company laptop

varispeed 6 hours ago

You would think that tech job will pay enough to buy a laptop.

yieldcrv 5 hours ago

pervasive assumption that the consumer choice is based on ability to make the consumer choice

they're not interested, they view it as a work tool and they always have one as they avoid gaps in their resume

no different than say, a work badge. you can buy an NFC enabled badge from ebay but you never will

rvba an hour ago

You would think that those in tech jobs are interested in tech and have a full box of various computers.

stevekemp 5 hours ago

I've worked at a few companies where they'd offer to sell, for a nominal amount, the work-laptops to ex-staff.

I know the last time I left my job I was given the opportunity to buy an M1 mac with 16Gb of RAM for €100, so of course I did.

(Though I also paid €500 to keep the phone they'd bought for me, which was perhaps not such a good deal, it was convienent and I do like the phone, but I'd have been happy to have a random cheap android phone, I have no specific requirements beyond "small enough to fit inside a sporran"!)

pjmlp 8 hours ago

Which is why time off exists, at least on countries with civilised labour laws.

paxy 7 hours ago

No need to take the day off. It's pretty common to be "sick" when you have an interview.

pjmlp 7 hours ago

Yeah, or that.

alexfoo 6 hours ago

For my most recent job (Staff/Principal SWE) I interviewed at four companies, each with four rounds of interviews (usual variations on 30m recruiter screen, 45m-60m tech discussion or coding exercise, 60m-90m tech deep dive, 30m-45m final wrap up with hiring manager). All over the course of about 3 weeks. It was about 16 hours in total.

No chance you can do that on "sick days", fake doctor/dentist appointments, or other such scheming. Taking many half days of personal leave just isn't workable either. You're not in full control of the scheduling to make different companies interview you one after each other on the same day, or take the same time between rounds. Some could have been scheduled in lunch breaks but not all of it.

Most people I've worked with would just schedule some "focus time" and were either WFH or headed off to a quiet part of the office or a nearby co-working space. Personal laptops are easier to use offsite obviously.

pjmlp 3 hours ago

I usually refuse such Silicon Valey interview style, unless I am desperate for a new position.

For the ones I usually take, a few hours out from overtime budget is enough, or WFH days.

With 30 days holidays + overtime budget, taking a day off for an site interview, is manageable.

kakacik an hour ago

> Taking many half days of personal leave just isn't workable either.

Why it isn't? A genuine question, I presume this is more typical US culture or dare I say workaholism and various self-pressures to maintain some public office image?

I recently took quite a few half days off to manage workers doing bigger reconstruction in our apartment. Sometimes full day. Then smashed a week of vacation in Sardinia in between. Everybody understood whats happening, nobody cared since many went through similar exercise before.

Your time is your time, if you actually let it happen. Or you can spend your life living with servile attitude, nobody will thank you though.

alexfoo 21 minutes ago

> Why it isn't? A genuine question,

Because my personal leave is time I want to spend with my family. I would have had to have taken about 4 days worth of leave (8 half days) to cover these interviews and that's 4 days a year less I get to spend with my wife and kids.

(UK based so not US culture, and not workaholism or image.)

appreciatorBus 5 hours ago

If you’re interviewing, why wouldn’t you book the time off? Take a half-day so you can prep, and of course, do it on your personal equipment.

paganel 5 hours ago

> If you’re interviewing, why wouldn’t you book the time off?

Because those half-days soon add up, in this market you don't apply just to one company.

gorbachev 20 minutes ago

Fake interviews also use social engineering tricking people to accept interview requests at short notice, so that they maximize the chances they'll be connected from work.

firstplacelast 3 hours ago

It's not that hard if they're actually interested in you. It's a good way to weed out a lot of the performative, pipeline filler interviews.

illiac786 2 hours ago

Sorry but that’s very entitled. Not everyone has the luxury of being chased by head hunters after hours…

busyant 6 hours ago

This is more of an amusing story, but it kind of fits ...

I have a relative who started (what has become) a successful winery.

During the first few years he worked on the winery on nights/weekends, but he kept his day-job as a finance guy at a relatively large company.

He told me he had to give a presentation at the company one day, plugged his laptop into the conference room projector and up popped a spreadsheet of wine-making measurements (pH, temperature, % alcohol, etc.). He said everyone in the room laughed.

maccard 5 hours ago

Anecdotally, I've also seen the same thing, and _done_ the same thing (on the zoom accounts). A previous companies policy allowed for zoom logins on non-corp devices so that you could take a late call from home. The only thing I _ever_ use zoom for is work or interviews, so it's not like I'm going to log out after?

HeavenFox 9 hours ago

I do know people who no longer have a personal computer, and use exclusively their work-issued computer. I wonder how common that is.

krautsauer 8 hours ago

May be the opposite, but BYOD is a thing and has the same result, security-wise…

sgerenser 8 hours ago

Yeah, I almost suspect a lot of these cases are BYOD (like the above commenter who said 70% of the Zoom interviews he hosted showed the candidate using their current company's Zoom account). I just can't imagine there are that many people dumb enough to interview on a "work computer" otherwise. In the world of small or less tech savvy companies, BYOD is pretty common.

pjmlp 7 hours ago

Usually BYOD requires IT clearance and installation of the same management software like company devices.

ajb 8 hours ago

Around 2005, my employer at the time did a refresh of our it equipment, replacing all the cheap stuff we had been acquired with. They asked everyone to say if they need a laptop, as desktops were the default at the time. I said I didn't, and was surprised when he turned out that almost everyone else said they did. Most of them didn't really need one, and presumably were planning to use them for personal stuff.

The company was a bit salty about this as laptops are more expensive, but they got them. And of course the company befitted, as that was the end of a clear separation between work and home. You have your laptop, you can answer email and attend meetings with people in other time zones. Before, it was easy; work stuff stayed on work computers and those didn't leave the office when you went home.

pjmlp 8 hours ago

Here it doesn't matter, the employees aren't required, by law, to answer any of that.

ajb 4 hours ago

Unless all your colleagues militantly refuse to answer, there can still be social pressure. Probably the best case is if your laws mandate overtime pay. But I'd be interested to know if there are stats about which laws are effective.

pjmlp 3 hours ago

Relatively effective in the last 30 years, in what concerns me.

pjmlp 8 hours ago

Not much around here, while it is tolerated for accessing something over the Web, the cyber security trainings explicitly mention being a possible way for job termination when something goes wrong, after installing anything not cleared by IT.

f6v 5 hours ago

Binance is no startup, but there’s essentially no “IT” in a company with ten software engineers.

podocarp 9 hours ago

It's convenient. I'm not lugging two laptops around!

jstanley 9 hours ago

But if he'd done the interview on his personal laptop then he would have had his personal crypto wallet drained instead, seems like he came out ahead this way.

javier123454321 8 hours ago

Found the optimist

samudrijan 4 hours ago

Smoke testing his social engineering skills.

999900000999 8 hours ago

A lot of people just think laptop == laptop.

At several companies I’ve seen folks run torrents to watch movies at work.

Once I was on a Zoom call, and I noticed music production software on my colleagues computer.

When I pointed it out, they responded with something like “ Ohh, my kids make music.”

Neat, I guess.

aleph_minus_one 8 hours ago

> A lot of people just think laptop == laptop.

We are talking about highly educated people who work in software development (i.e. can assumed to have some minimum viable knowledge about computers), and not about the dumbest imaginable users.

dylan604 8 hours ago

> We are talking about highly educated people

That's a bit of charity isn't it? Lot's of people in tech that really not that clever even if they are smart. Also, people in HR aren't as tech savvy.

aleph_minus_one 8 hours ago

Nearly all people who work in tech have a university degree, many even a PhD.

xhkkffbf 7 hours ago

Except for the bosses like Zuckerberg, Jobs, Wozniak, Gates....

Do I need to go on?

f6v 5 hours ago

There’re plenty of dumb people with a PhD. I’ve done three semesters of calculus and advanced physics for my BSc in engineering. Looking back, there wasn’t all that much to develop my critical thinking. Like, you can solve the problems and still say the stupidest shit.

It wasn’t until my PhD when I took an elective in Argumentation theory that I learned about constructing a good argument. And I only learned about fallacies somewhere on the internet.

* I have a PhD in STEM.

999900000999 8 hours ago

> Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed.

-Darth Vader.

Being able to make React components does not require you to be smarter than the average person.

You also have multiple types of intelligence. I worked with a brilliant intern once. The kid was over 100k in student loan debt and didn’t know the loans can’t get discharged.

draygonia 7 hours ago

They can be discharged if you are determined to be disabled by a doctor and live for 3 years below the poverty income limit.

999900000999 7 hours ago

The bar for that is extremely high.

They can garnish Social Security if you default on Student Loans.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-much-social-security-garnis...

draygonia 3 hours ago

The bar for disability for the Dept of Education is far lower than the bar to qualify for Social Security Disability. A simple letter from a doctor is all you need to discharge the student loans (plus living 3 years under the poverty limit).

999900000999 2 hours ago

Good to know.

I’m not going to look it up, but at a certain point you’re judgement proof anyway.

I suspect that many desperately poor can successfully dodge the garnishment.

koito17 8 hours ago

It's an anecdote, but one of my coworkers has Steam installed on his MacBook (of all computers). He is a data scientist. Technically, we're only allowed to install software from an approved list maintained by the IT security team. They clearly aren't enforcing that policy, though.

vkou 8 hours ago

Don't worry, they'll enforce it when someone installs something unapproved and it causes a problem.

vkou 8 hours ago

> highly educated people who work in software development

> dumbest imaginable users.

They are often one and the same.

pixl97 8 hours ago

SWE's are the worst about security, I swear most are worse than the average person when it comes to security practices.

"Need some new software" = "Download it from some random website"

"Software won't run" = "Turn off AV and get it everything permission"

"Still won't run" = "run as root"

aleph_minus_one 8 hours ago

> SWE's are the worst about security, I swear most are worse than the average person when it comes to security practices.

My experience is completely different: many software developers are rather paranoid with respect to security, and have quite a good (though far from expert-level) knowledge about security. It's rather that many software developers are quite hostile to security practices that are mostly "security theater" and obstructs them in doing their work.

The following Reddit post

> https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1e8do2...

and the top answer

> https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1e8do2...

describe the mindset that I observe rather well.

justsomehnguy 8 hours ago

Thanks for the laughs.

No, 'people who work in software development' != 'highly educated people' and those both != 'understand how computers work'.

paxy 5 hours ago

Educated != smart

Plenty of software engineeers (and doctors, lawyers, scientists...) are geniuses in their field but have zero common sense.

GaryBluto 8 hours ago

>Ohh, my kids make music.

It is one thing to do personal things on a work laptop, it is another all together to give your children free reign. Are there no penal measures taken to deter this anymore?

debo_ 7 hours ago

The penal measure is too late, it should have been penally applied before child was conceived.

gadders 8 hours ago

Working in a financial institution, I was surprised they could do all this. Our work laptops are so locked down (sometimes maybe too locked down) that we'd never be able to download a random .exe

I think Binance needs to start having IT Security like a bank as well.

GoToRO 8 hours ago

Usually it starts with a locked down laptop, then request after request, you get more rights, even admin on the laptop because otherwise you can't do anything as a software developer.

gadders 8 hours ago

Most banks give you a crippled version of Admin rights via a 3rd party tool. If you need more than that, tough/you're doing it wrong.

cityofdelusion 8 hours ago

Banks, at least in the U.S., are highly regulated and this would be very abnormal and subject to regulatory non-compliance, especially when the bank crosses into “big bank” territory. This stuff is regularly audited internally and externally.

sitkack 8 hours ago

You can dev without admin.

Tangurena2 6 hours ago

Our (state) agency uses separate computer accounts for regular use and admin use. The admin account has neither network nor email access in order to prevent using the admin account on a regular basis. With state government agencies continually attacked with ransomware, we aren't as bondage and discipline as banks (which I have done before) or DOE (which was very severely extremely locked down and I was not connected to classified stuffs).

I have not needed admin credentials for regular development purposes since VB6 (which I was using until 2013). VB6 and ActiveX dlls required read/write access to the registry all the time.

MrMorden 5 hours ago

Even if you do need admin for a developer laptop, that has no bearing on the PAW you use to authorize deployments and otherwise interact with production systems. Assuming your employer is even a quarter competent (i.e., not Binance).

Caloric3002Swed 8 hours ago

ah but that is boring, disruptive and too sysadminny. Its like the 90s. Cool companies have macbooks with full local admin. Devs need full access.

cityofdelusion 8 hours ago

It does boggle my mind as well. I’ve only ever worked in high security industries as a developer, and I’ve never had admin access unless I was on hardware deployment. Limited user accounts, Firewall blocks, Active Directory audits, and full file system and network log audits are the name of the game where I have been. Anything external gets flagged quickly by automation and anything severe gets an immediate phone call. Falling for a pen tester phishing more than once, getting your laptop stolen, and so on can get you on the poor performer list. It just seems obvious for critical domains.

plagiarist 8 hours ago

Cryptocurrency is like finding out why financial regulations exist speedrun

TacticalCoder 7 hours ago

> I think Binance needs to start having IT Security like a bank as well.

I don't disagree but note that apparently a bank in France, Credit Mutuel (and it's Fortuneo online arm), just got robbed of hundreds of millions of EUR: hackers who have beforehand created accounts on Kraken (a cryptocurrencies exchange) and who then wired millions to different accounts, bought cryptocurrencies, and withdraw the crypto.

But the hack was really stealing hundreds of millions from the bank.

So not even banks are safe now.

nradov 6 hours ago

Banks were never "safe" from fraud or theft, even before cryptocurrency existed. The key point was that customer accounts were segregated, and any customer losses were fully insured.

AlexITC 8 hours ago

This!

I don't know how people are ok using their personal accounts on work-laptops full of spyware.

margalabargala 7 hours ago

I've worked for a couple companies whose stance on me having a linux work laptop was "fine, but you have to support yourself".

So despite it being a "company" computer I personally installed the blank SSD and installed Arch on it and did not install any company spyware.

I was perfectly comfortable also having Steam installed so I could entertain myself on the plane on business trips. I knew everything installed and spyware wasn't on the list.

When I work at companies that have MDM set up on my computer, I don't do that.

genidoi 8 hours ago

It's dumb ideas all the way down, starting with the fact that this work laptop had a direct path to a multi-billion dollar signing environment.

dayvid 8 hours ago

Interviewing for another company on your work laptop is levels of idgaf I can't achieve

dewey 7 hours ago

Sure, but that's not really going to protect you. Could easily be that you are the interviewer and the interviewee asks you to click on sketchy link, or it could easily just be a call with a fake supplier or sales representative. It maybe makes it a little bit harder, but there's still many ways for social engineering to land something on work computers.

markus_zhang 7 hours ago

I agree with the principle but I think reading HN is fine...

AdrianB1 6 hours ago

Yes, but are the companies clear enough and paying enough so that people would never use their work computers for personal matters?

I have a personal desktop because I grew up with video games and a desktop was always a personal investment. I never had a personal laptop, I cannot justify the cost (not a trivial expense, even if my work title is extremely fancy it does not pay on par), so if I would be traveling I would have to take the only laptop I have with me - the work laptop. Well, I managed to never use it, I don't take it with me, but there is a lot of effort in that.

In such a company I would give employees 2 laptops and 2 phones, one set for work only, one set for personal use only, then I would fire on the spot anyone mixing the usage. That would be a start in a longer journey of protecting the company.

aaaronic 6 hours ago

This is definitely my approach. I won't log into _anything personal_ from my company equipment. Not even stuff like Spotify, anymore.

I also refuse to install Intune or similar on my personal hardware. Keep work and personal like oil and water!

varispeed 6 hours ago

Some workers can't afford personal laptops. There was a layoff announced today where company told workers to keep their company issued computers. Imagine that.

Often this is solely fault of employers not paying their workers enough.

zerr 6 hours ago

I know people grinding leetcode on work laptops, during working times, at the office, for interviews at other companies.

convict 5 hours ago

I do almost everything on my work macbook, including typing this comment, because it is faster than my own and has a nicer screen.

illiac786 2 hours ago

I would like to see stats on ownership of private computer. In my circle of friends it’s getting rare, only gamers keep theirs. Smartphones have gotten so insanely expensive, who wants to buy a private computer additionally…

AlwaysRock an hour ago

I agree. But plenty of folks only have their work laptop so dont have another device to do interviews on.

steveBK123 9 hours ago

Pretty funny that tech makes candidates jump through all sorts of automated, inhumane loops to even advance to talking to a real human in the hiring process.

And now you get results like this.

intrasight 9 hours ago

I remember in the mid-90s going to an interview in Manhattan - pre-Internet. Someone met me and led me to a table and said, "Here's where you're going to take your test." I said, "I don't take tests." She said "Everyone that comes in takes the test". I said, "Well, that's no longer true because I came in and I'm leaving without taking the test"

Horffupolde 9 hours ago

Wow how tough.

xyzsparetimexyz 9 hours ago

Haha owned

progforlyfe 9 hours ago

While I love the "edgy-ness" of this, I remember doing something like this around 2013 in Manhattan and kind of enjoyed it. They had me go into a room, and gave me a paper with an open ended question: it was something along the lines of, write as much detail as I could about what happens when a user visits a URL in a web browser. E.g. explain as much as I know about TCP, HTTP requests, web servers, etc. I think I touched on how Cookies worked as well.

No AI, no leet code, just old fashioned gauging someone's experience and communication skills.

nzjrs 9 hours ago

I did this as a test in 2018! Compares to the leetcode screens now, it was a dream

intrasight 8 hours ago

I'm fine with technical interviews that are "test-like", with questions and answers and discussion and with an engineer who is my technical equal. But this was not that.

steveBK123 8 hours ago

The more inhumane the screener the worse the job in my experience.

Had one recently that waived me thru and then sent me straight to talking to senior management/stakeholders/etc but literally no one on the team itself.

Couldn’t get a straight answer as to what team does, what role is for, real day to day I’d be walking.

Only clear thing was scale of architectural mess stemming from a political mess… and not a lot of interest in changing it.

They wanted a seasoned tech body to throw into the grinder 12-15hr days to replace the last one. No thanks.

intrasight 7 hours ago

My first job interview in 1989 after college:

Them: "Do you know TCP/IP?". Me: "Yes". Them: "you're hired"

Job at the Westinghouse instrumenting nuclear power plants. Simpler times then.

jandrese 3 hours ago

Back in 1989 that was a rare skill. Many of the engineers who had experience were working on government projects. I mean TCP barely had congestion control at that point, it was very early days.

vconnor 3 hours ago

Same for me in 2006 as a junior Linux sysadmin:

“What does ifconfig do? What does it mean to mount a disk? What editor do you use? You’re hired.”

None of that culture fit nonsense.

Tyr42 2 hours ago

Did you say vim or emacs? Might have been culture for afterall.

selicos an hour ago

Do you know DNS? How does an HTTPs/SSL handshake work? Man this kid is good hire him. - 2015 era job interview

_whiteCaps_ 6 hours ago

I love this test and will dive deep into switch debouncing on keyboards when they press the enter key.

camtarn 3 hours ago

I have never had the opportunity to ask this as an interview question. I'm secretly hoping that the first time I do so, somebody will lead off with "So, let's skip past the discussion of free will that might occur when considering how the user decides to visit the website, and instead start at the motor cortex..."

I'd also love a deep dive into the keyboard microcontroller that ends with the key press leaving over USB , and never even considers the main CPU.

Honestly, even the facetious answers to this have the potential to be incredibly interesting. Reality just has a ton of depth.

gilrain 9 hours ago

Excellent choice! No amount of money feels as good as claiming the respect you deserve.

hnlmorg 8 hours ago

And I bet you both came away from that interview feeling like you’d dodged a bullet. The interviewer just as much as yourself.

raincole 8 hours ago

I honestly don't know what's so wrong about taking a test for a job, unless the job already requires some kind of certifications/licenses. I, personally, wish that my doctors and lawyers have passed some tests.

aleph_minus_one 8 hours ago

> I honestly don't know what's so wrong about taking a test for a job, unless the job already requires some kind of certifications/licenses.

You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time. So it's very annoying to do some test over and over again for every job application.

raincole 7 hours ago

> You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time

Yep. Now substitute doctors/lawyers/accountants/civil engineers into the equation and see how you feel about it.

Surely they don't take a test for every client, but I'd consider the interview process more like a "workaround" for the lack of standardized tests for software engineers instead of the lack of respect.

hnlmorg 5 hours ago

They don’t take a test for every client. But they do get regularly monitored for their competency and instead of being fired when they fail, they have their professional license revoked.

Maybe IT professionals should be held to the same rigour. There’s a lot of deadweight in the profession that get paid too much and moan too loudly despite having a cushty job in a field they’re barely competent in.

toast0 6 hours ago

> You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time. So it's very annoying to do some test over and over again for every job application.

Ok, but there's no uniform grading in school or employment. We all know people who managed to get through university without learning anything and manage to hold a job in software development without knowing or doing anything. It'd be nice if a degree and a job history guaranteed competence, but it doesn't.

Lots of professions can bring a portfolio and/or a sample of their work, but most software developers can't because the work is often propriatary and a trade secret, and anyway would need a lot of specific setup to operate.

I've only taken test tests for government jobs, and they were laughably outdated; approximately nobody knew how much space was on a 5 1/4" floppy in 1998 when I took the test, but they were asking about 8" floppies, and I assume they still are, because the test had to go through some process and doing a new test would be expensive. But yeah, I expect a company to validate that I can both describe solutions to problems and turn that description into code.

steveBK123 8 hours ago

More often than not the test is at best tangentially related to the role.

At worst it’s the biggest hardos on the team writing a bunch of brain teasers and gotchas as a hazing ritual.

sgerenser 7 hours ago

Hey, one day the fate of the company is going to hinge on getting an accurate estimate of how many ping pong balls can fit into a 747, and they'll be glad that they asked the right brainteasers.

steveBK123 6 hours ago

I had one recently that was like.. I'd be better at this test if I knew less / was less experienced.

An hour to implement a toy version of a component which, the last time I did it "in real life" blew everyone away that I had a prototype ready in 1 day. That real life prototype went through weeks and weeks of iteration before it was even useful, and everyone was happy with that. But yeah that's something to time box to 1 hour in an interview environment.

So turns into an exercise of - which of the 100 pitfalls/nuances do they want me to pretend don't exist in order to complete it in 1 hour. Opinions vary!

There were multiple questions of this form.

One could pass this test blindly as a new grad not knowing the 100 pitfalls of actually building one in real life.

gosub100 8 hours ago

It's also for liability. If someone comes in with the intention of suing them, they can point to the test and have objective evidence that the rejection was not based on race or gender. It also allows them to gather data after the employee gets established and succeeds or fails.

Also in the mid 90s, you actually had to be smart to work in this field. There was no stack overflow or reddit to search. And CS programs were nascent.

Companies certainly have taken it too far, but I don't blame them for some usage of standard tests.

hnlmorg 4 hours ago

As a hiring manager, I can assure you that’s not true.

If you cannot explain why a successful candidate was chosen without bias, then you shouldn’t be interviewing candidates to begin with.

But it is always worth keeping a copy of your interview notes just in case the candidate asks for feedback.

bmacho 8 hours ago

I'm confused, I'm probably missing here something.

By 'test' you mean a school-type paper exam, questions and answers? (On unspecified topics.)

Why would you refuse that, when applying to a job?

paganel 5 hours ago

> Why would you refuse that, when applying to a job?

Not the OP, but from a certain point on (I'd say 3-5 years into one's career, I'd say maybe even earlier) school-type tests become quite ridiculous, as in real-life programming/development has nothing to do with how people are graded in school.

howunfortunate 3 hours ago

> nothing to do with how people are graded

If by "nothing to do with" you mean "uncorrelated", then this is very trivial and empirically untrue. There are a lot of tests that correlate with peer and manager-rated performance in software development (and many other roles).

Even the dumbest most ad hoc unrelated tests will have nonzero correlations, and the well-studied principled ones much more so.

The better argument is that tests are high effort and can feel demeaning. But it's not productive to pretend they don't work.

autoexec 6 hours ago

That's how I react to companies wanting personality tests.

nutjob2 an hour ago

How is mid 90's pre-internet?

fraywing 7 hours ago

I know several companies that are pulling SecOps resources in to vet candidates now. It's rough out there.

y-c-o-m-b 5 hours ago

Security aside, this is the real (and very sad) take away here. People are so desperate for an organic interview that they end up neglecting common sense. Employers will complain to no end about not finding qualified candidates or dealing with scam candidates, but they're ultimately responsible for perpetuating this predicament to begin with. They're constantly stretching what they can greedily get out of you; whether it's during the hiring phase or while being employed.

I remember doing 6 hours of interviews once for a company, getting to the final stage and they wouldn't budge on $5,000 for a figure they initially accepted but reneged because the manager hiring me would be paid less than me. It was so petty. I turned it down back then, but I'm not sure I would in this market. I'd probably take it and job search while I'm working there like this guy did at Binance.

xutopia 9 hours ago

I was #opentowork on LinkedIn and got approached multiple times with fake companies and interviews. LinkedIn is not doing enough to combat this.

I even create a 1 man company for my consulting services and I receive ads about how people at my company saved me a spot on an online game.

LinkedIn is partially responsible for their neglect here.

phendrenad2 6 hours ago

LinkedIn is a wasteland. Guarantee Microsoft leadership forgets it exists or that they own it. The sooner we stop giving it misplaced respect the sooner it can be replaced by something better.

ronsor 2 hours ago

LinkedIn is basically a tumor on Microsoft acting independently.

pants2 6 hours ago

Agreed, LinkedIn makes it very easy to spoof your credentials. There was a fake profile posing as a recruiter from my company trying to phish people for a long time, we reported it 100x and nothing happened. Finally ran into a guy at a party who worked for LinkedIn and convinced him to flag it internally, lol

cwiggs 8 hours ago

No one wants to talk about the "internal AI Tool" being used to elevate to not 1 but 2 DevOps engineers?

> use of an internal AI tool as a springboard. The attacker leveraged the compromised computer of engineer B and used an internal AI tool to gain control over the Wallet DevOps Engineer A and another Wallet Software Engineer C. The attacker soon discovered Wallet DevOps Engineer A had a container deployment permission token on his computer.

With the AI craze going on recently I've worked at multiple companies where an internal AI tool was vibecoded and I've always been worried about the security implications.

socketcluster 2 hours ago

Someone tried to hack my computer with a fake job interview once. I believe it was a real person because there wasn't much latency.

They tried to get me to git clone a repo, presumably to get me to install malicious npm dependencies.

I refused, then they wanted me to download Claude Code but I told them I already had Claude Code harness installed on my machine... But they said I should install a different version of it; they sent me a link... The landing page was the same kind of design as Anthropic uses but I didn't recognise the URL. I stopped the interview right there.

phyzome an hour ago

If I end up in a situation like that I'll be strongly tempted to call the FBI.

sva_ 9 hours ago

It is crazy that this Engineer A fell for this malware ad (how do people still fall for these & how does Google still get away with serving malware like that):

https://isc.sans.edu/diary/32942

It is kind of weird that they mention it though, if they replaced the devices and rotated credentials? Just to later mention that an "internal AI tool" was used to steal that Engineer As credentials again?

And also, what are those "obfuscation techniques"? It looks very straight forward, replacing the pyenv, there's nothing much obfuscated in it? Except for putting it in a different folder.

arm32 8 hours ago

Let's not victim blame plz

rddbs 3 hours ago

No, what would be crazy is to think that zero engineers would fall for this.

mapmeld 2 hours ago

For people who were newly nervous about clicking an unfamiliar link, this is a blog post describing the initial intrusion - the attackers paid for an ad on Google Search mimicking the homebrew website, which tells you to install it through a script. It's something you might have copied directly into the terminal before.

overcast 2 hours ago

How did this get pumped by a brand new account so quickly, when there were already multiple submissions?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50353818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50357080

armcat 8 hours ago

I actually got contacted by North Koreans posing as Japanese VC looking to partner in the Nordics. I have an agent that scans my emails and does the inverse filtering, suggests when I should take a look. This is because I get insane amount of cold inbound. But it also flags suspicious emails and uses network tools to find out info about the sender. It flagged that one as a NK account (I later confirmed it was already flagged on the watch list in various reddit channels). Everyone should be arming themselves with email filtering agents now. What I’m worried about is grandmas and grandpas and general ppl that are behind the tech curve.

randomNumber7 8 hours ago

How would the North Koreans profit from hacking grandma's PC?

sevmardi 7 hours ago

Compromise the pc and use it a zombie for other ops. That's one example.

armcat 7 hours ago

It’s not the pc. It will be over the phone. They will call, use TTS with voice cloning to impersonate someone in their family, 5 seconds is all you need. Do a bank transfer to this address. Or click on this link we send you now over sms. You do a million of those.

Duwensatzaj 7 hours ago

Can you provide more information on your email filtering agent?

armcat 5 hours ago

I just have Codex hooked up to the email client plugin and an hourly scheduled task. Then I have a prompt for selecting the ones I should read and flagging the suspicious ones. The prompt is combined with memory since Codex now understands what is important to me. For suspicious research I have my own skills with a bunch of "usual" tools, dig, whois, openssl client, curl, virustotal, and web research across reddit and a few other sites.

Animats 4 hours ago

You meet the other side now and then. In my days at the aerospace company, we got an applicant from Russia with really good credentials from the Moscow Institute of Mathematical Sciences. They were really good in person, too. But the decision was "they had to be a plant".

I used to go to parties at Hacker Dojo in the early days of AI. Google wasn't into AI yet and Hacker Dojo had classes, often attended by Google people. (I learned way too much about support vector machines, in a class taught by a guy from BlackRock.) There were a lot of very good looking Chinese women at the parties who were very interested in what people were working on. They were very bright, understood the subject, and had business cards from small companies no one had heard of. Then one day they all disappeared and were not seen again. I regret not asking one how she liked working for the Third Department.

labrador an hour ago

I'm just a simple programmer from the Santa Cruz Mountains but how is it possible to withdraw that much money without scrutiny? I mean if I go to my bank and want to my hypothetical millions in cash they'll say "It'll take us awhile to collect that much cash and meanwhile the government requires us to ask you a few questions about what you're doing..."

selicos an hour ago

Welcome to crypto, where classic financial regulations are made up and the speculative assets called a currency are backed by nothing of value.

This is what crypto is all about: decentralized tokens that require central management and control to be useful and prevent fraud.

kyleblarson 5 hours ago

I like that the article referred to the hackers as miscreants. I don't see that word used very often. "Then, on October 20, the miscreants used the compromised computer and an internal AI tool to gain access to the computers of wallet DevOps engineer A and another wallet software developer, Engineer C."

DrBazza 7 hours ago

Anec-data - as an interviewer, last year, I had my first sketchy, perhaps 'North Korean', candidate.

The name on the CV, was, for the sake of privacy, Michael Smith, from Australia, and ticked the right boxes.

We'd expect a fluent, Aussie-accented English speaker. Instead, we had a candidate with a webcam that wouldn't work (weird!!), with clearly accented English of a East-Asian background. I suppose there's a vanishing chance they really were Mike Smith of Adelaide or wherever, but we couldn't take that chance. We tried rescheduling, but tumbleweeds...

debo_ 7 hours ago

I'm waiting for companies to start running remote screens like "OK, in this exercise, we need you to write a program that efficiently generates insults about Kim Jong Un."

pants2 6 hours ago

Haha I had the exact same interview experience, the candidate was named Connor Wood, from Austin, TX. I actually told them we couldn't continue the interview unless they turned on their webcam. Cut to a meek east asian man in a dimly lit room. Are you sure you're the Connor Wood that played on the UT Austin Lacrosse team?? LOL I don't know how they expected that ruse to work.

anal_reactor 35 minutes ago

TBH if they paid me €2 million I'd easily play the role of being a trustworthy white guy on fake interviews. And I'm sure that others would be convinced to do the same thing for much less.

DonHopkins 8 minutes ago

You're going to have a hell of a time pulling off the "trustworthy" part convincingly.

anal_reactor> Once I've been to an interview where first they made us solve a problem in a group and then we had 1-1 interviews. After the group task the guy immediately asked me "Don't you have a feeling that you might've been forcing your opinions onto others?" to which I replied "Yes, I have.". Absolute fucking Chad I was.

anal_reactor> If I died today, I wouldn't even get a slack memo "we miss anal_reactor". Modern economy proved that humans are totally fungible. I have a dream that someone would take me on a date. But I understand it's just a silly fantasy. I spent last two years at work doing projects that went nowhere because my manager is deaf to feedback. What is that even supposed to mean? If I don't pay taxes I'll go to jail. I tried inviting a neighbor for a beer. Didn't work.

anal_reactor> One painful lesson of my childhood was that coherent logic doesn't win arguments, telling people what they want to hear wins arguments.

anal_reactor> You cannot win US presidency twice while being dumb.

jedbrooke 6 hours ago

I’m sure there were other signs of sketchiness, but in case you weren’t aware there actually IS a sizable Chinese population in Australia (esp Melbourne)

slicktux 4 hours ago

These North Koreans are crafty… even getting US citizens to host laptop farms in their house for remote working.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/arizona-woman-sentenced-17m-i...

purplemantis 4 hours ago

“shared a social media account with him, including personal photos and videos posted on the platform, in order to build trust" -- I wonder if these were real photos and videos, or AI fakes. It's crazy how many fake profiles Instagram pushes into my feed lately, and how many people probably don't even realize they're fake.

xpct 2 hours ago

A common method is just taking somebody else's publically posted photos, with light editing on top. I imagine you can take them from sources that can't be reverse searched easily, like Facebook groups, or these days probably as frames from tiktoks, etc. That is to say, for some things, you don't really need GenAI.

israrkhan 6 hours ago

This article tells me that even if there were no north korean hackers, an engineer within the company had access to move billions of dollars in funds.

That is a huge red flag, and reflects on binance internal security. I would be wary of dealing with this company,

barbazoo 7 hours ago

The way I read the Binance post[0] is that the first mistake was "Engineer A from Wallet DevOps" clicking on a malicious Google ad[1]. If Google didn't provide that attack vector, maybe this wouldn't have happened that time.

[0] https://www.binance.com/en/blog/community/322915344375956676...

[1] https://isc.sans.edu/diary/32942

herzigma 37 minutes ago

I still think it was an inside job.

ejpir 19 minutes ago

Yes. Easy to just use this as an excuse for a shotty architecture and/or insider knowledge. They would never admit that.

inChargeOfIT 6 hours ago

No single person, especially an engineer, should have the ability to transfer funds. That's nuts and it says a lot about the security posture of that company.

ionwake 5 hours ago

Just want to highlight I came across one of these fake interviews last year and it unnerved me how close they came to succeed. I thought alot of about it and I realised they must have planned and been "coached" by a frontier LLM on how to go about social engineering me. This was a year ago! I can only shudder at their abilities now. It didnt work, but it was the closest attempt I'd ever witnessed.

Dont trust anything anymore.

veltas 7 hours ago

Imagine being able to steal billions in crypto from your work laptop and using same laptop to run code sent to you by another company. I wish I had their problems.

yunnpp 44 minutes ago

But did he pass the interview? I bet he got at least one Leetcode question.

paxy 9 hours ago

Why did the employee have direct access to $6.3 billion in customer funds?

Maken 9 hours ago

No directly, but he could deploy code that had access to customers' wallets. Which is even worse.

AlexITC 8 hours ago

I have been getting these since early 2023, still, most of them are simple to spot, the other side typically has video turned off, asks a bit about your experience and just nods without digging, they are in a hurry to send you their coding challenge.

In one of these many calls I got to see the face from the other side but lasted a few seconds only. Then he claimed that internet was bad and suggested we continued without video.

In this case they claim it was a 2 rounds interview with video turned on to simulate a more normal recruiting process.

Of course all of us are prone to get caught with the shield off but what surprises me is that the targeted dev took the challenge in the device from work.

stefap2 7 hours ago

It's getting really confusing with these online job offers, including interviews and assignments. Various people are pretending to be recruiters. I've basically stopped answering phone calls, and everything goes to voicemail unless the caller is in my contacts. But that is hard to do if you are looking for a job. Honestly, if you are the target of this type of campaign, as described in this article, there is probably a good chance you will get compromised, even if you are normally careful.

HelloUsername 9 hours ago

Source posted earlier: "29 October Binance Security Incident: Initial Findings and Response Update" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50359377