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Posted by smalltech 4 days ago

North Korean fake job interview led to $6.3B Binance heist(www.theregister.com)
656 points | 384 commentspage 4
gosen 4 days ago|
It's just a cherry on top of the existing hiring process in the IT. It wouldn't surprised that it will make things even worse - companies will be more scared to talk to anyone and good candidates will be scared to reply
dboreham 4 days ago||
My hunch is that this was partly an inside job. The "fake job interview" and "mistakenly downloaded trojaned homebrew" stories are to give plausible deniability. But they're not very plausible imho.
xboxnolifes 4 days ago|
They are very plausible though. There are so many fake job interview scams right now thats its insane. I've personally come across multiple that ive noticed, who knows if there are any that I didnt.

A very recent one wanted me to download an executable which was to "stop me from cheating with AI", which was clearly fake. I've had plenty of interviews where I was expected to clone, fix, and run a repo, which as far as I can tell, all were from legitimate companies. An illegitimate company could easy do the same process with malware.

Kuyawa 3 days ago||
Two factor authentication?

Binance bugs us all the time to confirm everything before making a $5 payment. Why don't they enforce higher security steps in their own wallets? Also, how can AI access Google Authenticator?

giantg2 4 days ago||
Yeah, lots of good conversation on steps to take. One thing I never see mentioned is who should review and test them. Especially for a financial company, it seems they have no IT compliance/audit functions. Even at many big companies it seems IT control creation, maintenance, and testing is largely ignored or just put onto the people implementing and performing the control - a huge conflict of interest. Control analyst posting are something like 1 to 10K when measured against dev postings. Really telling when it comes to what companies actually care about...
anon84873628 4 days ago||
I suspect we'll look back on "Nork" as a derogatory racial term that didn't need to be used here. Just call them the attackers, or by their group name, or whatever.
DonHopkins 3 days ago||
The politically correct collective noun is "A Kimspiracy of Norkzis".
seki285 3 days ago|||
It's a state backed actor that hates you and your way of life, fair game.
samirillian 3 days ago||
Yes they did kill countless Americans in a futile proxy war with Russia. Wait I got that backwards.
quaddoggy 4 days ago||
You must be fun at parties.
anon84873628 3 days ago|||
I'm actually not very PC and enjoy off-color humor.

But this is simply bad professional writing. It would be like calling a group of people Japs, Ruskies, Pakis, or Chinamen. Even if we assume less derogatory intent, you probably wouldn't use Yank, Pommy, or Desi in this context either.

anal_reactor 3 days ago|||
I remember that when I was a student everyone called Mathematical Analysis "anal" and then there's one guy whose Facebook profile pic was from a church and he said "the correct shortened term is MA".
whoanoway 3 days ago||
[dead]
kfichter 4 days ago||
Obligatory and should be obvious: a threat model that allows a single compromised laptop to result in a $6.3B loss is fundamentally flawed. Analyze the specific way that the laptop was compromised all you want, the fault here is entirely with the Binance security culture that allows such a gaping hole to exist in the first place.

I hope that Binance understands this and spends less time worrying about how the laptop was compromised and more time securing their systems under the very basic assumption that laptops will be compromised.

ETH_start 4 days ago||
North Korea's open hostility to Western systems combined with its highly proficient human capital creates a bizarre situation where a formidable state-level actor is waging unrelenting warfare against private companies that operate in the Western-led global economic system, and due to the nature of the internet and North Korea's nuclear deterrent, there is no way to force that actor to stop.
sznio 3 days ago|
China can disconnect them from the internet.
simianwords 4 days ago||
After reading this story I understood that a lot of pieces had to come together to make the plan work. It was a huge long shot from the start and that makes me wonder how many times they must have tried this in the past? To make long shots like this work they must have tried relentlessly; they would've tried hundreds of thousands of developers before this
maeln 4 days ago||
Recently, I was designing a technical test for a candidate and I thought about putting some prompt injection to try to see if the candidate used an agent and be part of a cybersecurity tests. I didn't do it because it felt unethical, but turns out you don't even need the prompt injection part.
kittikitti 4 days ago|
Zoom exploits could have done this without downloads. I don't interview on a computer with sensitive data, it's usually a throwaway. I sometimes get judged for doing the interview on a Chromebook or an old Mac and I hope that interviewers understand why I choose to do it this way.
oofbey 4 days ago|
What are these zoom exploits?
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