I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation

ChrisMarshallNY

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.

gtowey

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.

ge96

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

rdksu

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 !

nphardon

always a good day when we get an a post on front actually related to hacking on hackernews.

wxw

> 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

darth_avocado

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.

lantry

> 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?

sailfast

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…

drnick1

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.

ivanjermakov

> 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?).

wslh

I assume an standard way to do this is through a VM provided by the recruiter, right?

vardalab

My takeaway from this was that Claude was being completely useless as a helper Thanks to all the safety safeguards and that nonsense.

fitsumbelay

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

tclancy

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.

syntaxing

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?

luciana1u

at some point companies will realize they can just post all their backlog as take-home assignments and eliminate the engineering department entirely

pudgywalsh

Did no one else read far enough to see this was a DPRK (Best Korea) APT campaign?

IvanGoncharov

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.

iamcreasy

Interesting read. Is docker sandbox a solution in this situation?