North Korean fake job interview led to $6.3B Binance heist

steveBK123

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.

xutopia

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.

mynegation

Running interview assignment on a work computer… tsk tsk

Jianghong94

Am I the only one baffled by the fact that the engineer uses a work PC for a personal job interview assignment?

james_marks

Further evidence that 1) recruiting is broken and 2) developers make great targets, and we need to respond accordingly.

CommanderData

It's strange companies haven't cracked something as basic as remote hiring checks yet. There are tools available to stop AI screen recording tools, fake candidate tools yet many companies keep getting hit..

HelloUsername

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

kittikitti

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.

bilekas

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.

paxy

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

sva_

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 A s 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.

BigTTYGothGF

Good thing they didn't get anything important.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50353818

FLeXMurphy

I love these guys!

moralestapia

This is Binance/CZ's version of the story, but no one really knows the truth. They have a massive incentive to invent a story to cover up the incident. I'm not saying it's a cover-up, but the motive is definitely there. North Korea has denied responsibility, whereas they usually own up to their actions. Disregarding that, it just doesn't make sense for their internal security to be so lax. I've worked at big companies but with AUM lower than Binance, a lot of control and safeguards are in place to prevent one "rogue" employee from stealing everything. It's pretty much impossible for a company like Binance to not have implemented such things. I do not buy it.

armcat

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.

gosen

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

aleph_minus_one

What surprises me most about the Binance hacking story is that Binance employees seem to have used their work laptops for some "programming test" (whose purpose was - as we now know - spreading malware). I mean: if you even consider leaving your current company, you better leave no traces of your plan on your work laptop: you either use a private laptop or, even better, some burner laptop/computer that you reset afterwards.

AlexITC

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.

gandreani

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.