Wow, after reading this article, I figured out I was hacked, but with a way more sophisticated attack.
A few weeks ago, I had an interview with a CTO of a totally legit company.
It was weird because he had disabled the camera, and the person had a strong accent.
But everything else sounded like a normal screening interview, and the person definitely knew what he was talking about.
At the end of the interview, he explained to me that during the technical interview I would need to make some modifications to their project (it's an OSS product), so he asked me to clone the repo and check the setup.
Later, the HR person said the CTO got sick, so the interview would be postponed.
But a few days later, the HR profile was deleted from LinkedIn.
It was super weird, but it didn't trigger my suspicion until I saw this post on HackNews.
I checked, and the repo I was cloning and running during the interview had a malware payload.
P.S. I think it was a targeted attack because in the past I maintained a very popular NPM package with 43+M weekly downloads. That's my only explanation for why someone would carry out such a sophisticated social-engineering attack against me.
P.P.S. It's great that I have 2FA everywhere, and I always publish NPM packages manually without using tokens. But I need to wipe my laptop and reinstall everything.
I just checked my calendar, and it was a 45-minute interview scheduled on Calendly.
HR person sent me a link to Calendly so I could schedule an interview with the CTO.
I actually talked with someone pretending to be the CTO for 45 minutes.
I checked other similar threads on HN, but they don't mention an actual Google Meet call with a scammer.
Cloning should be fine on its own - git hooks aren't installable automatically, for reasons like this, and they treat anything that makes cloning unsafe as a pretty severe security issue so new discoveries get plugged quickly. This post's malware is possible because it's from a general archive, not a clone.
Though other stuff on your system might be less preventative, and that could run stuff in the repo folder. And I kinda wish git would force review of hooks and executable config everywhere before they're run - I would absolutely enable that, security is sometimes a bit annoying and that's inescapable.
Recently there seems to be an uptick in North-Korean attacks against developers. In addition to this type of attack, which has been going on for years, I recently get ~1 email a week from North Korean hackers. It's always a "Hello, I found your profile, want to collaborate?" e-mail.
Discord communities I am in for programming are similar. People show up and within a few days either ask for a job or suggest cooperation. Sure, you could argue these Discord people may actually be out of a job (in this economy, very likely), but the volume and similarity of the messages say otherwise. You can also tell people show up in... _weird places_ to ask for jobs. An example being the Discord community for a not-really-used Python library with ~0 actual activity - either this person is very bad at finding good places to jobhunt or some attacker is just crawling a list of Discord communities and attacking them all.
It's a shame but there are a _lot_ of attacks that abuse our trust in each other nowadays. A good reminder to, like mom and dad said, never trust strangers on the internet
Hmm, did anyone else have issues loading the screenshots here? I had to open most of them in a new tab to see them.
Regardless, that's a pretty sneaky scam, and definitely something that caught out a ton of would be candidates in the past. What's more, the Visual Studio Code project mentioned in the article sounds even more horrifying. Like, the tool seriously lets you run custom code whenever someone opens your project? That feels like a really blatant malware vector that should probably have at least some sort of security mitigation...
It's also rather worrying how little these job sites are doing about scams like this too. I get it, it's perhaps a bit difficult to catch out all kinds of wrongdoing here. But you'd think it'd be simple enough to restrict accounts from claiming to be associated with a company or organisation if there's no proof they work there. At the moment, you can basically claim to work for any company you like, or that you have any type degree from any institution under the sun. If this was verified in any real way, and messages had a large warning at the top if the original claiming to be from an organisation wasn't confirmed to work there, a lot of scams would far more difficult to pull off.
It's like Microsoft forgot about all the malware that was promulgated by Word and Excel macros that would run automatically when you opened a document.
> Why use a raw IP address? If anything, this screams “malware.”
If the victim is deep enough to check hook's content, it's unlikely they will just stop here losing suspicion. I'm sure most devs wouldn't think that doing `git commit` can be malicious (git security oversight?).
> Side note: Why use a raw IP address? If anything, this screams “malware.” At least register a decoy domain like lint-checker.com or jenkins-ci-runner.net. If the threat actors who wrote this are reading: take notes people!
Maybe they don't want to give any identifying info to the domain registrar? Or just minimizing their online presence?
> 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.
> 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
If LinkedIn actually cared about preventing scams, they could implement verification using company emails if you want to list your current employment. And if it is too much of a heavy burden, then at the minimum you should have it as an optional feature that recruiters would have to comply with, if they want to be legitimate.
Myself and my friends have for years created fake profiles to catfish recruiters and companies to find out what job reqs they have open and what they're looking for in a candidate. When JS frameworks got huge, it was really helpful to separate the legit companies and recruiters from the scammers.
I would imagine a lot of what went on then, is going on now with all the AI jobs and demand for people who have even a cursory knowledge of LLM's and automation.
Unfortunately this is becoming common, it happened to me today, I was suspicious at first but when they guy showed his face (first time, I guess this was a mistake) in the meet I started trusting them, suddenly their interted started failing and he suggested we both turn the camera off.
I was asked quickly about my experienced and he shared that I was a perfect fit, immediatelly I was asked for my github username, then, I was asked to share my screen, I ended the call to not waste more time but my guess is that I would be asked to do something with the project live.
I haven't dig into their malware approach (yet) but this pattern is too frequent to easily recognize it.
My takeaway from this is that I should use the same defense as when someone calls you "from you bank". When they reach out directly, go to the real company's site to apply and contact a real recruiter. If you can't validate that the business is legit before, then assume malfeasance.
Companies make this hard, a bit like various email scams where legit company communication comes from seemingly random domains (hello paypal). Often the company is legit, but theres no public contact that knows anything about the recruiter thats working for them.
Healthcare companies are the WORST at this - they will send you legitimate email from h34lthc4re.biz with a heart-happy-health.phishing.info link that you HAVE to use - and it's all legit.
Even if the attempt is legit, going to the company’s website/careers page to try and reach them is pointless. You application will just get lost among the thousands of others. Your best bet is to ask the recruiter to email you and check for a @<company.com> email address. And even if the attempt checks out don’t run untrusted code on your machine.
I'm not talking about switching to cold contacting companies as a job hunting strategy. I'm saying if you get a suspicious outreach from a rando on linked in on behalf of a company THEN you only continue if you can reach out to the same person via official company channels.
in principle that makes sense but there is no vector of reaching anyone
actual first party recruiter’s linkedin inbox is unusable full of candidates trying to take initiative, and there is no way to reach anyone from the company from the outside cold specifically to avoid that exact thing
That was a fun read, I wonder if vscode would still load the script if you click “don’t trust author”? That being said, can you embed something yourself and push the commit?
But, I don't think anybody pays attention to the workspace trust. When ".vscode" has launch commands, it should rather say, "Trusting this workspace runs the following command on your behalf" or something similar.
Are these kinds of tests still relevant in the AI age? Genuine question, I have not interviewed for a very long time. They seem as useful as take home college exams.
Although the questions sometimes trigger useful hallucinations (we were able to instantly disqualify tons from our last hiring batch due to a hallucinated Go stdlib call, their code didn't even compile), the other thing is that you can ask the candidate to talk about their code during an interview. I've seen plenty that submitted good answers but couldn't answer even basic questions about the code they wrote ("what does a sync.Waitgroup do?")
I stopped being surprised by new stuff I learn about an OS I've been using for 25+ and 10+ as my daily whip and just enjoy the discovery-buzz
these take-home interview nightmare stories are so common ... I'd hate to see a bad actor take advantage by offering a "service" to unsuspecting and underinformed folks like ... erm ... me
do you mean the machine which is connected through the victim's machine? if so, i should put this in a VM, run and see where it's sending/receiving requests from. i'll do that.
Oh that was way more common in the Wild Wacky West days.
Thankfully all my browsers are now configured to mute all sound from all sites until I grant express permission to play sound. Nips it in the bud, every time!
Had something similar but less dangerous recently: I “won” a month’s subscription to a brand new “high paying, not on the public sites” job board where if I wrote a cool integration I would make a bunch of money (except the fine print said they could just take it). It took about a minute and a half of playing with the API to see they hadn’t even bothered to fully trim the listings they scraped from other sites. Each job application required you to answer a fairly detailed engineering issue. Best I could tell is they stole your answer, applied to the gig and then did one of those bait and switch interviews with the actual company.
Not always. The safest way is to use a throwaway remote VM when dealing with untrusted content. Sandbox escaping is unlikely but still a risk on your laptop.
Really hate that the USG overreaction on Fable has given us a neutered version of AIs for DEFENSIVE capabilities even when we just want an explanation of what we’re being subjected to with this malware.
I don't think you should trust the recruiter's VM any more than their code. Spin up instead your own disposable VM or container with no creds or host mounts.
Clearly, judging by recent openai news, sandboxes are not unbreakable, but at least there's nothing worth stealing and you throw it away afterward.
I once received a suspiciously too good to be true job offer, and at the last minute they surprised me by insisting I use a specific laptop they insisted on mailing me. One they would possess prior to me, and "configure" as superuser, before giving to me to use while working for them.
I declined, as diplomatically as I could. I should not have to spell out in precise detail how dangerous to me their proposal was. In the eyes of an adversary/APT predator: ignorant --> naive --> gullible --> prey --> profit. Rinse, repeat, scale up.
Isn’t this how most tech companies, if not most companies in general, operate? Ive only had one BYOD job in 15 years. Even if you’re a contractor this is common.
Wow, after reading this article, I figured out I was hacked, but with a way more sophisticated attack.
A few weeks ago, I had an interview with a CTO of a totally legit company. It was weird because he had disabled the camera, and the person had a strong accent. But everything else sounded like a normal screening interview, and the person definitely knew what he was talking about. At the end of the interview, he explained to me that during the technical interview I would need to make some modifications to their project (it's an OSS product), so he asked me to clone the repo and check the setup.
Later, the HR person said the CTO got sick, so the interview would be postponed. But a few days later, the HR profile was deleted from LinkedIn. It was super weird, but it didn't trigger my suspicion until I saw this post on HackNews. I checked, and the repo I was cloning and running during the interview had a malware payload.
P.S. I think it was a targeted attack because in the past I maintained a very popular NPM package with 43+M weekly downloads. That's my only explanation for why someone would carry out such a sophisticated social-engineering attack against me.
P.P.S. It's great that I have 2FA everywhere, and I always publish NPM packages manually without using tokens. But I need to wipe my laptop and reinstall everything.
I just checked my calendar, and it was a 45-minute interview scheduled on Calendly. HR person sent me a link to Calendly so I could schedule an interview with the CTO. I actually talked with someone pretending to be the CTO for 45 minutes.
I checked other similar threads on HN, but they don't mention an actual Google Meet call with a scammer.
Yeah, I refuse to just clone random projects. Luckily, I’m a rails developer - and scaffolding entire applications takes literally minutes.
Just give me the specification and I will build it end to end myself.
If you’re serious you would consider it. If you don’t - I dodged a bullet.
If you consider that people are using LLMs for code generation pretty much exclusively now this should be possible with any stack.
Cloning should be fine on its own - git hooks aren't installable automatically, for reasons like this, and they treat anything that makes cloning unsafe as a pretty severe security issue so new discoveries get plugged quickly. This post's malware is possible because it's from a general archive, not a clone.
Though other stuff on your system might be less preventative, and that could run stuff in the repo folder. And I kinda wish git would force review of hooks and executable config everywhere before they're run - I would absolutely enable that, security is sometimes a bit annoying and that's inescapable.
Yikes.
Going to need containerised vscode in this world.
wow
> I maintained a very popular NPM package with 43+M weekly downloads
makes sense why they targetted you, good that you have 2FA enabled.
Sorry but not using a devpod or a vm for that in this age is just irresponsible. A random npm package can already do a lot of damage.
whoa
Recently there seems to be an uptick in North-Korean attacks against developers. In addition to this type of attack, which has been going on for years, I recently get ~1 email a week from North Korean hackers. It's always a "Hello, I found your profile, want to collaborate?" e-mail.
Discord communities I am in for programming are similar. People show up and within a few days either ask for a job or suggest cooperation. Sure, you could argue these Discord people may actually be out of a job (in this economy, very likely), but the volume and similarity of the messages say otherwise. You can also tell people show up in... _weird places_ to ask for jobs. An example being the Discord community for a not-really-used Python library with ~0 actual activity - either this person is very bad at finding good places to jobhunt or some attacker is just crawling a list of Discord communities and attacking them all.
It's a shame but there are a _lot_ of attacks that abuse our trust in each other nowadays. A good reminder to, like mom and dad said, never trust strangers on the internet
> They embedded a script that checks the victim’s host operating system and silently executes a remote payload.
Seems like this is becoming a recurring theme, similar story was on the front page last month.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546294
The OP says as much, and links to a Google Search results that says the same.
My takeaway from this was that Claude was being completely useless as a helper Thanks to all the safety safeguards and that nonsense.
Hmm, did anyone else have issues loading the screenshots here? I had to open most of them in a new tab to see them.
Regardless, that's a pretty sneaky scam, and definitely something that caught out a ton of would be candidates in the past. What's more, the Visual Studio Code project mentioned in the article sounds even more horrifying. Like, the tool seriously lets you run custom code whenever someone opens your project? That feels like a really blatant malware vector that should probably have at least some sort of security mitigation...
It's also rather worrying how little these job sites are doing about scams like this too. I get it, it's perhaps a bit difficult to catch out all kinds of wrongdoing here. But you'd think it'd be simple enough to restrict accounts from claiming to be associated with a company or organisation if there's no proof they work there. At the moment, you can basically claim to work for any company you like, or that you have any type degree from any institution under the sun. If this was verified in any real way, and messages had a large warning at the top if the original claiming to be from an organisation wasn't confirmed to work there, a lot of scams would far more difficult to pull off.
It's like Microsoft forgot about all the malware that was promulgated by Word and Excel macros that would run automatically when you opened a document.
everything is hosted on github pages, i'll have to use some cdn for images.
> Why use a raw IP address? If anything, this screams “malware.”
If the victim is deep enough to check hook's content, it's unlikely they will just stop here losing suspicion. I'm sure most devs wouldn't think that doing `git commit` can be malicious (git security oversight?).
> Side note: Why use a raw IP address? If anything, this screams “malware.” At least register a decoy domain like lint-checker.com or jenkins-ci-runner.net. If the threat actors who wrote this are reading: take notes people!
Maybe they don't want to give any identifying info to the domain registrar? Or just minimizing their online presence?
That's probably the reason bare IP addresses are associated with sketchy stuff.
Or possibly these hosts fell victims of their malware, too, and see now used as proxies.
That doesn't mean you can't set up DNS names to point at them.
fair point
always a good day when we get an a post on front actually related to hacking on hackernews.
Except hackernews is about different kind of hackers.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
> 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.
> 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
thanks!
If LinkedIn actually cared about preventing scams, they could implement verification using company emails if you want to list your current employment. And if it is too much of a heavy burden, then at the minimum you should have it as an optional feature that recruiters would have to comply with, if they want to be legitimate.
> they could implement verification using company emails
they added this back in 2023 (https://news.linkedin.com/2023/april/linkedin-s-new-verifica...), but very less people actually bother to verify with their email, so not having it doesn't always mean it's illegitimate.
The legitimate recruiters should start using it then.
Myself and my friends have for years created fake profiles to catfish recruiters and companies to find out what job reqs they have open and what they're looking for in a candidate. When JS frameworks got huge, it was really helpful to separate the legit companies and recruiters from the scammers.
I would imagine a lot of what went on then, is going on now with all the AI jobs and demand for people who have even a cursory knowledge of LLM's and automation.
Unfortunately this is becoming common, it happened to me today, I was suspicious at first but when they guy showed his face (first time, I guess this was a mistake) in the meet I started trusting them, suddenly their interted started failing and he suggested we both turn the camera off.
I was asked quickly about my experienced and he shared that I was a perfect fit, immediatelly I was asked for my github username, then, I was asked to share my screen, I ended the call to not waste more time but my guess is that I would be asked to do something with the project live.
I haven't dig into their malware approach (yet) but this pattern is too frequent to easily recognize it.
I assume these types of things are going to become more and more common.
Looks like these folks really did their homework.
It's nasty, but I have to respect their skills. I'll bet it works, quite often.
yea, i had fun looking around, this felt like a ctf challenge lol. if they had any vuln on their server, it would've been even better.
Their "skills" might just be borrowed from some LLM.
I dunno. The Norks seem to be really good at this, and have been, for a long time.
I suspect it's clever, experienced, engineers, leveraging LLMs.
Yeah, this scam is probably all automated at first place. Welcome to the "agent era"...
There was a funny video I saw recently someone's running Red Star OS on their computer and a scammer is trying to scam them thinking it's Windows
Unrelated to this git pre commit hook attack but yeah
My takeaway from this is that I should use the same defense as when someone calls you "from you bank". When they reach out directly, go to the real company's site to apply and contact a real recruiter. If you can't validate that the business is legit before, then assume malfeasance.
Companies make this hard, a bit like various email scams where legit company communication comes from seemingly random domains (hello paypal). Often the company is legit, but theres no public contact that knows anything about the recruiter thats working for them.
Healthcare companies are the WORST at this - they will send you legitimate email from h34lthc4re.biz with a heart-happy-health.phishing.info link that you HAVE to use - and it's all legit.
Even if the attempt is legit, going to the company’s website/careers page to try and reach them is pointless. You application will just get lost among the thousands of others. Your best bet is to ask the recruiter to email you and check for a @<company.com> email address. And even if the attempt checks out don’t run untrusted code on your machine.
it was in this moment, that gtowey’s outdated job solutions transitioned them from unc to boomer
I think you misunderstood.
I'm not talking about switching to cold contacting companies as a job hunting strategy. I'm saying if you get a suspicious outreach from a rando on linked in on behalf of a company THEN you only continue if you can reach out to the same person via official company channels.
in principle that makes sense but there is no vector of reaching anyone
actual first party recruiter’s linkedin inbox is unusable full of candidates trying to take initiative, and there is no way to reach anyone from the company from the outside cold specifically to avoid that exact thing
That was a fun read, I wonder if vscode would still load the script if you click “don’t trust author”? That being said, can you embed something yourself and push the commit?
> I wonder if vscode would still load the script if you click “don’t trust author”
It doesn't. VSCode dev replied here on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46719712.
But, I don't think anybody pays attention to the workspace trust. When ".vscode" has launch commands, it should rather say, "Trusting this workspace runs the following command on your behalf" or something similar.
Typical. I’m uninstalling VSCode right now. Does it leave any malware behind that can still run things? Probably.
Are these kinds of tests still relevant in the AI age? Genuine question, I have not interviewed for a very long time. They seem as useful as take home college exams.
Although the questions sometimes trigger useful hallucinations (we were able to instantly disqualify tons from our last hiring batch due to a hallucinated Go stdlib call, their code didn't even compile), the other thing is that you can ask the candidate to talk about their code during an interview. I've seen plenty that submitted good answers but couldn't answer even basic questions about the code they wrote ("what does a sync.Waitgroup do?")
It's either leetcode style interviews or take-home assessments AFAIK
TIL about tree ...
I stopped being surprised by new stuff I learn about an OS I've been using for 25+ and 10+ as my daily whip and just enjoy the discovery-buzz
these take-home interview nightmare stories are so common ... I'd hate to see a bad actor take advantage by offering a "service" to unsuspecting and underinformed folks like ... erm ... me
I also learned about tree today and second this sentiment. What a delightful perspective to consider it a discovery buzz.
One of those programs that shoulda been in coreutils
at some point companies will realize they can just post all their backlog as take-home assignments and eliminate the engineering department entirely
> Naturally, the next move was pivoting from defense to offense. I wanted to see if the attackers left any vulnerable services exposed on their IP.
Why not attack them through the C2 interface? That's where I'd expect them to slip up.
> C2 interface
do you mean the machine which is connected through the victim's machine? if so, i should put this in a VM, run and see where it's sending/receiving requests from. i'll do that.
Welp, this is not going make this job market any easier to navigate.
I checked for a way to globally disable git hooks. There is no built-in way of doing this.
Hooks are not checked in to the repo, so they used a zip archive.
Nice read, but having your home page play music is incredible rude.
Oh that was way more common in the Wild Wacky West days.
Thankfully all my browsers are now configured to mute all sound from all sites until I grant express permission to play sound. Nips it in the bud, every time!
Had something similar but less dangerous recently: I “won” a month’s subscription to a brand new “high paying, not on the public sites” job board where if I wrote a cool integration I would make a bunch of money (except the fine print said they could just take it). It took about a minute and a half of playing with the API to see they hadn’t even bothered to fully trim the listings they scraped from other sites. Each job application required you to answer a fairly detailed engineering issue. Best I could tell is they stole your answer, applied to the gig and then did one of those bait and switch interviews with the actual company.
Interesting read. Is docker sandbox a solution in this situation?
Not always. The safest way is to use a throwaway remote VM when dealing with untrusted content. Sandbox escaping is unlikely but still a risk on your laptop.
Did no one else read far enough to see this was a DPRK (Best Korea) APT campaign?
i should've highlighted that better, it has more gravitas (https://youtube.com/shorts/LpevGTOP1-A?si=DRJUH4EMujesXiXN)
Really hate that the USG overreaction on Fable has given us a neutered version of AIs for DEFENSIVE capabilities even when we just want an explanation of what we’re being subjected to with this malware.
Give defenders a better shot…
Bruh the harry potter theme song scared the shit out of me as it turned itself on. Bad UX for a personal site. Great article btw !
Where can one be whimsical and fun if not for a personal site?
sorry, i added it to set the mood for my site :') yk, like moving lamps at the top, hanging dementor at the right side (only visible on desktops).
should i remove it?
absolutely not! it is a delightful source of whimsy on an increasingly uniform web
Middle ground: make it respect `prefers-reduced-motion` :)
No, it's your playground. My podcast was talking about the music the guest was making and I thought he was playing something Potter related.
>should i remove it?
there is no place for fun, whimsy, moods, or personalization on the web. sorry.
(no, at least not at the request of random internet stranger #10545346)
Around here, many people have their sense of humor, removed, during their first colonoscopy.
I joke, anyway, and bear the downvotes. Totally worth it.
No, it made me laugh.
NEVER PURGE YOUR WHIMSY.
I used developer tools to delete the dementor, then I muted the site when it started playing music.
might as well "curl https://citizendot.github.io/articles/fake-job-interview-git..." and read the output :')
Nah, it's fine! I just muted the tab, no big deal
Nah, keep it. It's your site and that's where you get to have fun!
yes
I assume an standard way to do this is through a VM provided by the recruiter, right?
I don't think you should trust the recruiter's VM any more than their code. Spin up instead your own disposable VM or container with no creds or host mounts.
Clearly, judging by recent openai news, sandboxes are not unbreakable, but at least there's nothing worth stealing and you throw it away afterward.
I assume a VM that is running in the cloud will be enough. Not thinking about a local one.
yea, i'm just lazy
I once received a suspiciously too good to be true job offer, and at the last minute they surprised me by insisting I use a specific laptop they insisted on mailing me. One they would possess prior to me, and "configure" as superuser, before giving to me to use while working for them.
I declined, as diplomatically as I could. I should not have to spell out in precise detail how dangerous to me their proposal was. In the eyes of an adversary/APT predator: ignorant --> naive --> gullible --> prey --> profit. Rinse, repeat, scale up.
Isn’t this how most tech companies, if not most companies in general, operate? Ive only had one BYOD job in 15 years. Even if you’re a contractor this is common.
hmm, i don't understand why you think this is suspicious. doing their stuff on their machine is ... fine i guess?
You'll have to spell it out for me the problem, because that seems entirely what a corporation with an actual IT department would do.