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.
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
> 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?).
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?")
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 checked other similar threads on HN, but they don't mention an actual Google Meet call with a scammer.
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.
> I maintained a very popular NPM package with 43+M weekly downloads
makes sense why they targetted you, good that you have 2FA enabled.
Going to need containerised vscode in this world.
Seems like this is becoming a recurring theme, similar story was on the front page last month.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546294
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
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?).
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.
Maybe they don't want to give any identifying info to the domain registrar? Or just minimizing their online presence?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I suspect it's clever, experienced, engineers, leveraging LLMs.
Unrelated to this git pre commit hook attack but yeah
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.
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.
Why not attack them through the C2 interface? That's where I'd expect them to slip up.
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.
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
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!
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)
I joke, anyway, and bear the downvotes. Totally worth it.
Give defenders a better shot…
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 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.