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.
Also Superman III, which predates it and presumably was well known to the writers. But I have an inkling the scheme and it's infamy go back much further. (Precious metal coin clipping/debasement?) It's one of those ethical questions, like a pauper stealing bread, or thought experiments, like "what if reality is just a dream" that many if not most people encounter during their formative years. Per usual, though, the chasm between theory and application (even just identifying real world potential when it matters) is the toughest one to cross.
Not just that! The EIP-7702 delegation to make the wallet into a smart contract bypassed all of the controls that they had in place on the signer. It's wild that they didn't have a system in place to stop it from signing that transaction type.
> 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.
One of the first things I did in my last job was shift processes like this off my team's computers, aside from the security ramifications all it takes is one dumb mistake, one up-arrow too many, one didn't-read-the-whole-line, and now you're doing something to production by accident!
100% this. I can deploy to our sandbox environment directly, but only our CI/CD has the permissions to build/deploy to our master environment. And the stuff I work on is 1000x less impactful than $billions in crypto!
I think it will remain uncommon. I agree it would be a good test, but companies and employees alike get very angry when pentesting gets too close to sensitive subjects.
Anyone who fell for it would not only get in trouble for poor security practice, they would reveal that they were job searching. That opens an entire can of worms that creates problems beyond the pentest. This also angers other employees who see it as a double-trap being sprung on employees.
Another major problem is that responsible employees who accept the fake interview but then use their personal laptop to do the interview will have their personal laptop compromised by the pentesters. Responsible testers will immediately abort, but some will try to use the personal laptop to pivot deeper which is a huge ick. It’s also really bad if the company is compromising personal laptops of people who are doing the right thing (switching to personal gear for interviews).
The pentesters wouldn't have to actually pwn a laptop, just getting the employee to download and run anything could go in a report without having the file actually be malicious.
Sometimes called "Full Spectrum Attack Simulation" where initial entry can include physical access or spear phishing. They can span months in elapsed time (not effort) so as to be more realistic. However there are still ethical and safety constraints and even phishing may not be able to use the (effective) technique of stressing the recipient too much or of course blackmail or coercing. So I think fake interviews may not be allowed in many cases, to protect the employees.
Legality would be very jurisdiction dependent. It might be illegal in most developed Western countries, depending on the exact facts of the case. I suspect it wouldn't be illegal in China — unless the trick happened to hit a ranking Communist Party member.
It'll be hard to time a job opening receiving interviews to line up with intrusion tests in a way that people would not be on guard against it in a way not normal.
What if I plant a hook on the engineer’s laptop that will slightly modify their commits in such a way that eventually I smuggle malicious code over? First, exfiltrate the code over to me, learn from previous commits, start poisoning. Stamped by the CI, no less. In the days of slop PRs thousands of lines each shouldn’t be even too hard.
The point is that at some point you do need to open the door and let the code in.
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.
In my last job we used Zoom for interviews. The link we sent would work in any web browser, but if the candidate was signed into a Zoom account on their computer we'd be able to see it. I'd say >70% of them were on their company account.
Even worse when you have to do stuff like screenshare or coding. I've had candidates share their screen and have obvious proprietary material in open windows. I've seen countless email inboxes and calendars. I've seen candidates do coding exercises using internal IDEs, dev environments and dev tools. I've had them talk – fully unprompted – about internal tech and unreleased projects. And I'm talking about Google, Meta, Amazon, Coinbase, Uber.
At this point I'm convinced that a large chunk of tech interviews are happening just to extract insider info from employees.
This is more of an amusing story, but it kind of fits ...
I have a relative who started (what has become) a successful winery.
During the first few years he worked on the winery on nights/weekends, but he kept his day-job as a finance guy at a relatively large company.
He told me he had to give a presentation at the company one day, plugged his laptop into the conference room projector and up popped a spreadsheet of wine-making measurements (pH, temperature, % alcohol, etc.). He said everyone in the room laughed.
Being an engineer I am surprised, but for normal staff its very common to not have a personal laptop. The most common request from layoffs or firings in my company has been a request to keep their company laptop
I have never hidden the fact from any of my management in any of my companies that I interview with other companies on a semi-regular basis.
It reminds them that while I am a replaceable cog in their machine, I am also a cog that other machines would like to install given the right opportunity. And I am always aware of my current market value.
How does that prevent you from using your personal laptop for a job interview?
It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose. It seems absurdly lazy, but I know that not everyone's life works like mine, so I would like to understand why this would be a real problem for people.
I had a really bad meeting one day that became the straw that broke the camel's back. When I went back to my desk, I saw an interesting job posting. I immediately fired up the company's copy of Word to draft up a resume, and used the company computer to send the email from my personal account. Less than a month later, I was working for the new company. It was done intentionally. I almost sent the resume via company email, but I really wanted to ensure I could access any response.
> It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose
That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.
For 99% of people, the default would be "I'm going to join this Zoom meeting from the laptop I use all day long to join Zoom meetings, and I'm going to code using the laptop I use all day long to code".
Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer. Their personal laptop might be relatively underpowered and struggle to run all the required software efficiently during an interview. The issue becomes even more significant as more of the tools used require an account - you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service, so you just use the ones you're used to using every day.
If you work from the office, and they have tight security, they might frown upon bringing personal devices to connect to the internal network.
Also, some people might not have dev environments set up on their personal devices. Heck, a lot of people only use the internet through their smartphone, when they're not at work.
Oh, gosh, it hadn't occurred to me that they'd be doing the interview on the internal network!! I guess what we're getting to, here, is a profound ignorance of corporate infosec and the fact that everything you do on company hardware can be monitored. That seems obvious to me but clearly that must not be common knowledge.
For my most recent job (Staff/Principal SWE) I interviewed at four companies, each with four rounds of interviews (usual variations on 30m recruiter screen, 45m-60m tech discussion or coding exercise, 60m-90m tech deep dive, 30m-45m final wrap up with hiring manager). All over the course of about 3 weeks. It was about 16 hours in total.
No chance you can do that on "sick days", fake doctor/dentist appointments, or other such scheming. Taking many half days of personal leave just isn't workable either. You're not in full control of the scheduling to make different companies interview you one after each other on the same day, or take the same time between rounds. Some could have been scheduled in lunch breaks but not all of it.
Most people I've worked with would just schedule some "focus time" and were either WFH or headed off to a quiet part of the office or a nearby co-working space. Personal laptops are easier to use offsite obviously.
But if he'd done the interview on his personal laptop then he would have had his personal crypto wallet drained instead, seems like he came out ahead this way.
Working in a financial institution, I was surprised they could do all this. Our work laptops are so locked down (sometimes maybe too locked down) that we'd never be able to download a random .exe
I think Binance needs to start having IT Security like a bank as well.
It does boggle my mind as well. I’ve only ever worked in high security industries as a developer, and I’ve never had admin access unless I was on hardware deployment. Limited user accounts, Firewall blocks, Active Directory audits, and full file system and network log audits are the name of the game where I have been. Anything external gets flagged quickly by automation and anything severe gets an immediate phone call. Falling for a pen tester phishing more than once, getting your laptop stolen, and so on can get you on the poor performer list. It just seems obvious for critical domains.
Usually it starts with a locked down laptop, then request after request, you get more rights, even admin on the laptop because otherwise you can't do anything as a software developer.
Our (state) agency uses separate computer accounts for regular use and admin use. The admin account has neither network nor email access in order to prevent using the admin account on a regular basis. With state government agencies continually attacked with ransomware, we aren't as bondage and discipline as banks (which I have done before) or DOE (which was very severely extremely locked down and I was not connected to classified stuffs).
I have not needed admin credentials for regular development purposes since VB6 (which I was using until 2013). VB6 and ActiveX dlls required read/write access to the registry all the time.
Banks, at least in the U.S., are highly regulated and this would be very abnormal and subject to regulatory non-compliance, especially when the bank crosses into “big bank” territory. This stuff is regularly audited internally and externally.
> I think Binance needs to start having IT Security like a bank as well.
I don't disagree but note that apparently a bank in France, Credit Mutuel (and it's Fortuneo online arm), just got robbed of hundreds of millions of EUR: hackers who have beforehand created accounts on Kraken (a cryptocurrencies exchange) and who then wired millions to different accounts, bought cryptocurrencies, and withdraw the crypto.
But the hack was really stealing hundreds of millions from the bank.
Banks were never "safe" from fraud or theft, even before cryptocurrency existed. The key point was that customer accounts were segregated, and any customer losses were fully insured.
Around 2005, my employer at the time did a refresh of our it equipment, replacing all the cheap stuff we had been acquired with. They asked everyone to say if they need a laptop, as desktops were the default at the time. I said I didn't, and was surprised when he turned out that almost everyone else said they did. Most of them didn't really need one, and presumably were planning to use them for personal stuff.
The company was a bit salty about this as laptops are more expensive, but they got them. And of course the company befitted, as that was the end of a clear separation between work and home. You have your laptop, you can answer email and attend meetings with people in other time zones. Before, it was easy; work stuff stayed on work computers and those didn't leave the office when you went home.
Not much around here, while it is tolerated for accessing something over the Web, the cyber security trainings explicitly mention being a possible way for job termination when something goes wrong, after installing anything not cleared by IT.
Yeah, I almost suspect a lot of these cases are BYOD (like the above commenter who said 70% of the Zoom interviews he hosted showed the candidate using their current company's Zoom account). I just can't imagine there are that many people dumb enough to interview on a "work computer" otherwise. In the world of small or less tech savvy companies, BYOD is pretty common.
It is one thing to do personal things on a work laptop, it is another all together to give your children free reign. Are there no penal measures taken to deter this anymore?
We are talking about highly educated people who work in software development (i.e. can assumed to have some minimum viable knowledge about computers), and not about the dumbest imaginable users.
> Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed.
-Darth Vader.
Being able to make React components does not require you to be smarter than the average person.
You also have multiple types of intelligence. I worked with a brilliant intern once. The kid was over 100k in student loan debt and didn’t know the loans can’t get discharged.
> SWE's are the worst about security, I swear most are worse than the average person when it comes to security practices.
My experience is completely different: many software developers are rather paranoid with respect to security, and have quite a good (though far from expert-level) knowledge about security. It's rather that many software developers are quite hostile to security practices that are mostly "security theater" and obstructs them in doing their work.
It's an anecdote, but one of my coworkers has Steam installed on his MacBook (of all computers). He is a data scientist. Technically, we're only allowed to install software from an approved list maintained by the IT security team. They clearly aren't enforcing that policy, though.
I've worked for a couple companies whose stance on me having a linux work laptop was "fine, but you have to support yourself".
So despite it being a "company" computer I personally installed the blank SSD and installed Arch on it and did not install any company spyware.
I was perfectly comfortable also having Steam installed so I could entertain myself on the plane on business trips. I knew everything installed and spyware wasn't on the list.
When I work at companies that have MDM set up on my computer, I don't do that.
Sure, but that's not really going to protect you. Could easily be that you are the interviewer and the interviewee asks you to click on sketchy link, or it could easily just be a call with a fake supplier or sales representative. It maybe makes it a little bit harder, but there's still many ways for social engineering to land something on work computers.
Some workers can't afford personal laptops. There was a layoff announced today where company told workers to keep their company issued computers. Imagine that.
Often this is solely fault of employers not paying their workers enough.
Yes, but are the companies clear enough and paying enough so that people would never use their work computers for personal matters?
I have a personal desktop because I grew up with video games and a desktop was always a personal investment. I never had a personal laptop, I cannot justify the cost (not a trivial expense, even if my work title is extremely fancy it does not pay on par), so if I would be traveling I would have to take the only laptop I have with me - the work laptop. Well, I managed to never use it, I don't take it with me, but there is a lot of effort in that.
In such a company I would give employees 2 laptops and 2 phones, one set for work only, one set for personal use only, then I would fire on the spot anyone mixing the usage. That would be a start in a longer journey of protecting the company.
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.
I remember in the mid-90s going to an interview in Manhattan - pre-Internet. Someone met me and led me to a table and said, "Here's where you're going to take your test." I said, "I don't take tests." She said "Everyone that comes in takes the test". I said, "Well, that's no longer true because I came in and I'm leaving without taking the test"
While I love the "edgy-ness" of this, I remember doing something like this around 2013 in Manhattan and kind of enjoyed it. They had me go into a room, and gave me a paper with an open ended question: it was something along the lines of, write as much detail as I could about what happens when a user visits a URL in a web browser. E.g. explain as much as I know about TCP, HTTP requests, web servers, etc. I think I touched on how Cookies worked as well.
No AI, no leet code, just old fashioned gauging someone's experience and communication skills.
I'm fine with technical interviews that are "test-like", with questions and answers and discussion and with an engineer who is my technical equal. But this was not that.
The more inhumane the screener the worse the job in my experience.
Had one recently that waived me thru and then sent me straight to talking to senior management/stakeholders/etc but literally no one on the team itself.
Couldn’t get a straight answer as to what team does, what role is for, real day to day I’d be walking.
Only clear thing was scale of architectural mess stemming from a political mess… and not a lot of interest in changing it.
They wanted a seasoned tech body to throw into the grinder 12-15hr days to replace the last one. No thanks.
I honestly don't know what's so wrong about taking a test for a job, unless the job already requires some kind of certifications/licenses. I, personally, wish that my doctors and lawyers have passed some tests.
Hey, one day the fate of the company is going to hinge on getting an accurate estimate of how many ping pong balls can fit into a 747, and they'll be glad that they asked the right brainteasers.
I had one recently that was like.. I'd be better at this test if I knew less / was less experienced.
An hour to implement a toy version of a component which, the last time I did it "in real life" blew everyone away that I had a prototype ready in 1 day. That real life prototype went through weeks and weeks of iteration before it was even useful, and everyone was happy with that. But yeah that's something to time box to 1 hour in an interview environment.
So turns into an exercise of - which of the 100 pitfalls/nuances do they want me to pretend don't exist in order to complete it in 1 hour. Opinions vary!
There were multiple questions of this form.
One could pass this test blindly as a new grad not knowing the 100 pitfalls of actually building one in real life.
> I honestly don't know what's so wrong about taking a test for a job, unless the job already requires some kind of certifications/licenses.
You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time. So it's very annoying to do some test over and over again for every job application.
> You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time. So it's very annoying to do some test over and over again for every job application.
Ok, but there's no uniform grading in school or employment. We all know people who managed to get through university without learning anything and manage to hold a job in software development without knowing or doing anything. It'd be nice if a degree and a job history guaranteed competence, but it doesn't.
Lots of professions can bring a portfolio and/or a sample of their work, but most software developers can't because the work is often propriatary and a trade secret, and anyway would need a lot of specific setup to operate.
I've only taken test tests for government jobs, and they were laughably outdated; approximately nobody knew how much space was on a 5 1/4" floppy in 1998 when I took the test, but they were asking about 8" floppies, and I assume they still are, because the test had to go through some process and doing a new test would be expensive. But yeah, I expect a company to validate that I can both describe solutions to problems and turn that description into code.
> You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time
Yep. Now substitute doctors/lawyers/accountants/civil engineers into the equation and see how you feel about it.
Surely they don't take a test for every client, but I'd consider the interview process more like a "workaround" for the lack of standardized tests for software engineers instead of the lack of respect.
It's also for liability. If someone comes in with the intention of suing them, they can point to the test and have objective evidence that the rejection was not based on race or gender. It also allows them to gather data after the employee gets established and succeeds or fails.
Also in the mid 90s, you actually had to be smart to work in this field. There was no stack overflow or reddit to search. And CS programs were nascent.
Companies certainly have taken it too far, but I don't blame them for some usage of standard tests.
Agreed, LinkedIn makes it very easy to spoof your credentials. There was a fake profile posing as a recruiter from my company trying to phish people for a long time, we reported it 100x and nothing happened. Finally ran into a guy at a party who worked for LinkedIn and convinced him to flag it internally, lol
LinkedIn is a wasteland. Guarantee Microsoft leadership forgets it exists or that they own it. The sooner we stop giving it misplaced respect the sooner it can be replaced by something better.
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):
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 As 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.
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.
It’s not the pc. It will be over the phone. They will call, use TTS with voice cloning to impersonate someone in their family, 5 seconds is all you need. Do a bank transfer to this address. Or click on this link we send you now over sms. You do a million of those.
Depends on who the grandma is and how patient they are. If you were somehow connected to a network that could be accessed to transfer billions of dollars, your grandma or your partners grandma or someone you trust IRL might be a potential target. Or if not them, then someone they trust.
No one wants to talk about the "internal AI Tool" being used to elevate to not 1 but 2 DevOps engineers?
> use of an internal AI tool as a springboard. The attacker leveraged the compromised computer of engineer B and used an internal AI tool to gain control over the Wallet DevOps Engineer A and another Wallet Software Engineer C. The attacker soon discovered Wallet DevOps Engineer A had a container deployment permission token on his computer.
With the AI craze going on recently I've worked at multiple companies where an internal AI tool was vibecoded and I've always been worried about the security implications.
Anec-data - as an interviewer, last year, I had my first sketchy, perhaps 'North Korean', candidate.
The name on the CV, was, for the sake of privacy, Michael Smith, from Australia, and ticked the right boxes.
We'd expect a fluent, Aussie-accented English speaker. Instead, we had a candidate with a webcam that wouldn't work (weird!!), with clearly accented English of a East-Asian background. I suppose there's a vanishing chance they really were Mike Smith of Adelaide or wherever, but we couldn't take that chance. We tried rescheduling, but tumbleweeds...
Haha I had the exact same interview experience, the candidate was named Connor Wood, from Austin, TX. I actually told them we couldn't continue the interview unless they turned on their webcam. Cut to a meek east asian man in a dimly lit room. Are you sure you're the Connor Wood that played on the UT Austin Lacrosse team?? LOL I don't know how they expected that ruse to work.
I’m sure there were other signs of sketchiness, but in case you weren’t aware there actually IS a sizable Chinese population in Australia (esp Melbourne)
I'm waiting for companies to start running remote screens like "OK, in this exercise, we need you to write a program that efficiently generates insults about Kim Jong Un."
The way I read the Binance post[0] is that the first mistake was "Engineer A from Wallet DevOps" clicking on a malicious Google ad[1]. If Google didn't provide that attack vector, maybe this wouldn't have happened that time.
It's getting really confusing with these online job offers, including interviews and assignments. Various people are pretending to be recruiters. I've basically stopped answering phone calls, and everything goes to voicemail unless the caller is in my contacts. But that is hard to do if you are looking for a job. Honestly, if you are the target of this type of campaign, as described in this article, there is probably a good chance you will get compromised, even if you are normally careful.
Imagine being able to steal billions in crypto from your work laptop and using same laptop to run code sent to you by another company. I wish I had their problems.
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...
No single person, especially an engineer, should have the ability to transfer funds. That's nuts and it says a lot about the security posture of that company.
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.
> Binance’s endpoint security tools did not immediately detect the malware.
Yes of course they didn't. The whole "endpoint security" industry is a scam. They're attempting to (or attempting to appear to) solve an impossible problem. All they do is install spyware and backdoors, reducing security rather than enhancing it.
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.
The practice of installing software during a job interview should be forbidden by law.
Some companies require you to install Windows remote administration tools (basically root kits) on your machine to check whether you are using search engines or AI. It is insane.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Founder of Callstrike here .. we build real time deepfake & voice impersonation attack simulation tools for a living so this is literally what I deal with every day.
The biggest irony is that we get at least a couple of signups every month from South Korea, Russia, India, Nigeria just to try getting access to our platform for running these attacks ..
Here is the most recent copy paste from a Calendly invite ..
>Invitee Email:
>ashley@cairnsovereign.net
>Invitee Time Zone:
>Central European Time
>Questions:
>Please share anything that will help prepare for our meeting.
>We are an MSP from the UK that is look for a deepfake platform to run campaigns for our clients. We typically use open source software but there is a gap in our portfolio for deepfake testing that we can't fill with our usual open source philosophy.
The company website https://www.cairnsovereign.net/ was registered just 2 days ago .. they have no linkedin presence, fake CEO and fake CTO and fake everything ..
I still accepted the invite and joined and the person has a strong northern british accent .. he askd me to let his AI bot join the call to take notes ... i refused .. to which he swore and said that if a meeting bot is not allowed .. then i dont want to talk and abruptly hung up ...
PS: if anyone wants to see .. this is what a real time voice impersonation call and real time deepfake faceswap .. looks like ..
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.
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.
People are talk about all the security aspects of this which are all valid. But what I saw here is that Binance is running a sweatshop here. So even someone holding secret for billions is actively looking for potential role from a Noname company.
There is no evidence given that North Korea did this.
"TRM attributes this attack to TraderTraitor, North Korea’s premier hacking unit. We base this assessment on robust on and off-chain intelligence sources. The FBI named the same group as responsible for the USD 1.5 billion Bybit hack in February 2025. Several features of this attack match earlier North Korea-linked heists, including the Bybit hack and the KelpDAO hack in April 2026: small Tornado Cash withdrawals funding an operator wallet, staging that began well before the theft, and signatures obtained in advance then executed in one burst. The laundering observed so far, built on large swaps through market makers and lending protocols, differs from the bridge-heavy pattern that followed Bybit. TRM will share further findings as the investigation develops."
This is simply an assertion that an official enemy did something we don't like. It could just as well be a CIA money laundering scheme. This would make more sense, given the wider deployment of US cyber weapons and assets as well as the desire of North Korea not to provoke American aggression which previously murdered about 20% of their population.
It is widely known America has cyberweapons deployed around the globe. It is likely trivial for them to fake a trail of evidence from the DPRK.
Where do these people find jobs so secure that they wouldn’t bat an eye at interviewing for another job in a context where their current employer can watch them do so?
Even if you don’t understand the security concerns of running some 3rd party’s scripts on a work device, more pedestrian situational awareness should have prevented such a wild misjudgment?
Probably. I have seen many colleagues across the cubicle aisles spending their time on things completely unrelated to their work. I would be baffled to hear that you have not had similar experiences.
As a hiring manager, do you hold that behavior against candidates for positions where poor security practices could become a major liability for your company?
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
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.
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.
The lawsuits are coming, and the systems have logs. There is no incentive to lie about technical details that will come out in discovery in due course.
Don't forget that logs can be faked unless they are obtained directly by law enforcement forensic teams. In the case of Binance EU, their parent company is an offshore entity outside the direct reach of US and EU authorities. Consequently, anything Binance says or presents will most probably be taken as-is by western courts.
Another important note is that Binance has a strong incentive to cover up certain details, given that the company itself is anything but transparent. They also control CoinMarketCap, where they promote only projects that serve their own interests, while rejecting legitimate projects due to Binance's conflicts of interest. Several public reports and data document these practices.
>> "...and is working with law enforcement, blockchain intel firms, and security researchers to trace and freeze the assets. The crypto exchange has also hired independent cybersecurity experts to conduct a cybersecurity review of the incident, and recommend additional protective measures."
>> trace and freeze the assets
It has gotten to the point where the advertised permanence of cryptocoin transactions is a serous national security threat, literally funneling $6+billion to a nation-state whose publicly avowed statements is to destroy the US to fund its nuclear weapons program.
The party is ending. The house lights are flashing. Crypto will either become controlled so illegitimate transactions will be roll-back-able (presumably with proper court or NatSec orders), or it will be banned.
This is already a reality. USDT, USDC, and many other smart contracts allow for the freezing of funds worldwide. Arbitrum rolls back its chain whenever it wants. State-sponsored Twitter influencers like Taylor Monahan (tayvano_), Zachary Wolk (ZachXBT), and Nick Bax (bax1337), falsely flagged as independent, publicly appeal to Thorchain (the only decentralized swap protocol between various native on-chain assets) to integrate transaction screening directly into the node consensus. EU has made accepting Monero illegal starting in 2027, among many other measures. Western governments have already succeeded in making crypto very controllable.
This is insane. The first engineer ran some curl bash, which gave the hackers access to his Slack, and then they set up an interview for him at a fake company and during that interview, they convinced an engineer to download and install some code they had written? This is just clown world.
A lot of detail on what Engineer A, B and C did. But this would've been prevented if Engineer A didn't have "a container deployment permission token on his computer".
What the fuck? On a target as big as Binance? Every developer should be treated as a liability and never be able to deploy by themselves.
Not as easy as that, these can be real people with genuine businesses across the other side of the world, which sounds like what happened here. They only have to seem friendly and genuine before asking you to perform a coding test or whatever.
Unfortunately:
1) The dev downloaded it onto a work laptop which was really poor behaviour
2) It sounds like the developer environment was very open instead of segmented. Common but an easy control to use in a high-risk environment.
3) Sounds like a lack of any elevation process e.g. if a developer needed to access a wallet, it very much should sound an alarm/require explicit permission etc.
If she hadn't done it on her work laptop, her personal would have been pwned anyway. It's not clear to me how to protect oneself while also looking for work.
…what? That’s not how this works. You don’t get to misuse company resources for the purpose of transferring the risks associated with your personal activities from yourself to your employer.
I think we need to implement a new handshake protocol for job interviews.
Both candidate and recruiter have to call Kim Jong Un a big fat tosser (other swearwords are available) on a recorded video before the interview continues.
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.
Nobody in the entire company should have access to move $billions in crypto, much less a random engineer, even if they're part of the deploy process.
They had controls in place to prevent large transfers, so the attackers structured it as a lot of small transfers very quickly
A disgruntled employee wouldn't do the exact same thing?
That's the plot of Office Space!
Also Superman III, which predates it and presumably was well known to the writers. But I have an inkling the scheme and it's infamy go back much further. (Precious metal coin clipping/debasement?) It's one of those ethical questions, like a pauper stealing bread, or thought experiments, like "what if reality is just a dream" that many if not most people encounter during their formative years. Per usual, though, the chasm between theory and application (even just identifying real world potential when it matters) is the toughest one to cross.
They also mention that in the movie.
Not just that! The EIP-7702 delegation to make the wallet into a smart contract bypassed all of the controls that they had in place on the signer. It's wild that they didn't have a system in place to stop it from signing that transaction type.
I think they did that in Superman 3
This isn't a mundane detail, Michael!
Be your own IRM 4.26.13!
I mean sure, but as long as you can deploy directly any permissions models are meaningless for an attacker? They can just be removed.
> 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.
One of the first things I did in my last job was shift processes like this off my team's computers, aside from the security ramifications all it takes is one dumb mistake, one up-arrow too many, one didn't-read-the-whole-line, and now you're doing something to production by accident!
I also did that, for a team deploying smart contract on chain from local.
It took a couple months to get the pipeline out of their laptop.
Worth it, yes, as we found interesting things in there which explained why they were so reluctant to deploy upgrades.
> as we found interesting things in there which explained why they were so reluctant to deploy upgrades
.. backdoors which enabled the dev to deploy exploits of their own which wouldn't be visible through CI?
TBH CI does not prevent this kind of mistakes. I've seen people triggering the wrong CI pipeline.
I guess people triggering the pipeline is already part of the problem
100% this. I can deploy to our sandbox environment directly, but only our CI/CD has the permissions to build/deploy to our master environment. And the stuff I work on is 1000x less impactful than $billions in crypto!
I have saw companies doing social engineering as part of their intrution testing, I imagine fake interviews are (or will become) part of these.
I think it will remain uncommon. I agree it would be a good test, but companies and employees alike get very angry when pentesting gets too close to sensitive subjects.
Anyone who fell for it would not only get in trouble for poor security practice, they would reveal that they were job searching. That opens an entire can of worms that creates problems beyond the pentest. This also angers other employees who see it as a double-trap being sprung on employees.
Another major problem is that responsible employees who accept the fake interview but then use their personal laptop to do the interview will have their personal laptop compromised by the pentesters. Responsible testers will immediately abort, but some will try to use the personal laptop to pivot deeper which is a huge ick. It’s also really bad if the company is compromising personal laptops of people who are doing the right thing (switching to personal gear for interviews).
Companies don't try to set up job interviews to test their employees loyalty?
Everyone has their price. It is foolish to think that most people would not leave for better title/pay/job alignment/whatever.
The pentesters wouldn't have to actually pwn a laptop, just getting the employee to download and run anything could go in a report without having the file actually be malicious.
Would they have legal right to do that, out of curiosity?
Hired oentest has company permission to do stuff on company property. I do not imagine they have right to do so to personal property.
Absolutely not. There is literally no framework, which would give you the right to exploit an employee’s personal laptop, that’s just cyber crime.
Then that is something the pentesters cannot do, but malicious actors will do.
Game over.
Sometimes called "Full Spectrum Attack Simulation" where initial entry can include physical access or spear phishing. They can span months in elapsed time (not effort) so as to be more realistic. However there are still ethical and safety constraints and even phishing may not be able to use the (effective) technique of stressing the recipient too much or of course blackmail or coercing. So I think fake interviews may not be allowed in many cases, to protect the employees.
Is that even legal? Wouldn’t a fake job interview be, in a sense, tricking you into taking time off and working without pay?
Legality would be very jurisdiction dependent. It might be illegal in most developed Western countries, depending on the exact facts of the case. I suspect it wouldn't be illegal in China — unless the trick happened to hit a ranking Communist Party member.
It'll be hard to time a job opening receiving interviews to line up with intrusion tests in a way that people would not be on guard against it in a way not normal.
Fake interviews would be a huge time sink and probably piss off your staff.
They don't have to respond. It gives employers an even stronger signal they should be kept right?
Using pentesting to also test employee loyalty is a great way to get the entire company to hate working there.
Which is why it's going to happen.
No such thing as deleting secrets. You decommission them and replace them. Deleting them off disk is impractical to do, at least sufficiently.
What if I plant a hook on the engineer’s laptop that will slightly modify their commits in such a way that eventually I smuggle malicious code over? First, exfiltrate the code over to me, learn from previous commits, start poisoning. Stamped by the CI, no less. In the days of slop PRs thousands of lines each shouldn’t be even too hard.
The point is that at some point you do need to open the door and let the code in.
The company should require both automated and human review of PRs. Mine does.
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.
In my last job we used Zoom for interviews. The link we sent would work in any web browser, but if the candidate was signed into a Zoom account on their computer we'd be able to see it. I'd say >70% of them were on their company account.
Even worse when you have to do stuff like screenshare or coding. I've had candidates share their screen and have obvious proprietary material in open windows. I've seen countless email inboxes and calendars. I've seen candidates do coding exercises using internal IDEs, dev environments and dev tools. I've had them talk – fully unprompted – about internal tech and unreleased projects. And I'm talking about Google, Meta, Amazon, Coinbase, Uber.
At this point I'm convinced that a large chunk of tech interviews are happening just to extract insider info from employees.
This is more of an amusing story, but it kind of fits ...
I have a relative who started (what has become) a successful winery.
During the first few years he worked on the winery on nights/weekends, but he kept his day-job as a finance guy at a relatively large company.
He told me he had to give a presentation at the company one day, plugged his laptop into the conference room projector and up popped a spreadsheet of wine-making measurements (pH, temperature, % alcohol, etc.). He said everyone in the room laughed.
as a candidate it's pretty tough scheduling interviews past 5pm or on the weekends
What’s preventing you from using a personal laptop ?
Being an engineer I am surprised, but for normal staff its very common to not have a personal laptop. The most common request from layoffs or firings in my company has been a request to keep their company laptop
You would think that tech job will pay enough to buy a laptop.
pervasive assumption that the consumer choice is based on ability to make the consumer choice
they're not interested, they view it as a work tool and they always have one as they avoid gaps in their resume
no different than say, a work badge. you can buy an NFC enabled badge from ebay but you never will
Hi Bob, why are you using your personal laptop at your desk instead of the company's laptop?
If you are openly interviewing for other jobs from your desk I don't think which laptop you use is going to be anyone's concern.
I have never hidden the fact from any of my management in any of my companies that I interview with other companies on a semi-regular basis.
It reminds them that while I am a replaceable cog in their machine, I am also a cog that other machines would like to install given the right opportunity. And I am always aware of my current market value.
Their current job, presumably
How does that prevent you from using your personal laptop for a job interview?
It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose. It seems absurdly lazy, but I know that not everyone's life works like mine, so I would like to understand why this would be a real problem for people.
I had a really bad meeting one day that became the straw that broke the camel's back. When I went back to my desk, I saw an interesting job posting. I immediately fired up the company's copy of Word to draft up a resume, and used the company computer to send the email from my personal account. Less than a month later, I was working for the new company. It was done intentionally. I almost sent the resume via company email, but I really wanted to ensure I could access any response.
> It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose
That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.
For 99% of people, the default would be "I'm going to join this Zoom meeting from the laptop I use all day long to join Zoom meetings, and I'm going to code using the laptop I use all day long to code".
Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer. Their personal laptop might be relatively underpowered and struggle to run all the required software efficiently during an interview. The issue becomes even more significant as more of the tools used require an account - you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service, so you just use the ones you're used to using every day.
If you work from the office, and they have tight security, they might frown upon bringing personal devices to connect to the internal network.
Also, some people might not have dev environments set up on their personal devices. Heck, a lot of people only use the internet through their smartphone, when they're not at work.
Oh, gosh, it hadn't occurred to me that they'd be doing the interview on the internal network!! I guess what we're getting to, here, is a profound ignorance of corporate infosec and the fact that everything you do on company hardware can be monitored. That seems obvious to me but clearly that must not be common knowledge.
Which is why time off exists, at least on countries with civilised labour laws.
No need to take the day off. It's pretty common to be "sick" when you have an interview.
Yeah, or that.
For my most recent job (Staff/Principal SWE) I interviewed at four companies, each with four rounds of interviews (usual variations on 30m recruiter screen, 45m-60m tech discussion or coding exercise, 60m-90m tech deep dive, 30m-45m final wrap up with hiring manager). All over the course of about 3 weeks. It was about 16 hours in total.
No chance you can do that on "sick days", fake doctor/dentist appointments, or other such scheming. Taking many half days of personal leave just isn't workable either. You're not in full control of the scheduling to make different companies interview you one after each other on the same day, or take the same time between rounds. Some could have been scheduled in lunch breaks but not all of it.
Most people I've worked with would just schedule some "focus time" and were either WFH or headed off to a quiet part of the office or a nearby co-working space. Personal laptops are easier to use offsite obviously.
But if he'd done the interview on his personal laptop then he would have had his personal crypto wallet drained instead, seems like he came out ahead this way.
Found the optimist
Working in a financial institution, I was surprised they could do all this. Our work laptops are so locked down (sometimes maybe too locked down) that we'd never be able to download a random .exe
I think Binance needs to start having IT Security like a bank as well.
It does boggle my mind as well. I’ve only ever worked in high security industries as a developer, and I’ve never had admin access unless I was on hardware deployment. Limited user accounts, Firewall blocks, Active Directory audits, and full file system and network log audits are the name of the game where I have been. Anything external gets flagged quickly by automation and anything severe gets an immediate phone call. Falling for a pen tester phishing more than once, getting your laptop stolen, and so on can get you on the poor performer list. It just seems obvious for critical domains.
Usually it starts with a locked down laptop, then request after request, you get more rights, even admin on the laptop because otherwise you can't do anything as a software developer.
Our (state) agency uses separate computer accounts for regular use and admin use. The admin account has neither network nor email access in order to prevent using the admin account on a regular basis. With state government agencies continually attacked with ransomware, we aren't as bondage and discipline as banks (which I have done before) or DOE (which was very severely extremely locked down and I was not connected to classified stuffs).
I have not needed admin credentials for regular development purposes since VB6 (which I was using until 2013). VB6 and ActiveX dlls required read/write access to the registry all the time.
Most banks give you a crippled version of Admin rights via a 3rd party tool. If you need more than that, tough/you're doing it wrong.
Banks, at least in the U.S., are highly regulated and this would be very abnormal and subject to regulatory non-compliance, especially when the bank crosses into “big bank” territory. This stuff is regularly audited internally and externally.
You can dev without admin.
ah but that is boring, disruptive and too sysadminny. Its like the 90s. Cool companies have macbooks with full local admin. Devs need full access.
> I think Binance needs to start having IT Security like a bank as well.
I don't disagree but note that apparently a bank in France, Credit Mutuel (and it's Fortuneo online arm), just got robbed of hundreds of millions of EUR: hackers who have beforehand created accounts on Kraken (a cryptocurrencies exchange) and who then wired millions to different accounts, bought cryptocurrencies, and withdraw the crypto.
But the hack was really stealing hundreds of millions from the bank.
So not even banks are safe now.
Banks were never "safe" from fraud or theft, even before cryptocurrency existed. The key point was that customer accounts were segregated, and any customer losses were fully insured.
Cryptocurrency is like finding out why financial regulations exist speedrun
I do know people who no longer have a personal computer, and use exclusively their work-issued computer. I wonder how common that is.
Around 2005, my employer at the time did a refresh of our it equipment, replacing all the cheap stuff we had been acquired with. They asked everyone to say if they need a laptop, as desktops were the default at the time. I said I didn't, and was surprised when he turned out that almost everyone else said they did. Most of them didn't really need one, and presumably were planning to use them for personal stuff.
The company was a bit salty about this as laptops are more expensive, but they got them. And of course the company befitted, as that was the end of a clear separation between work and home. You have your laptop, you can answer email and attend meetings with people in other time zones. Before, it was easy; work stuff stayed on work computers and those didn't leave the office when you went home.
Here it doesn't matter, the employees aren't required, by law, to answer any of that.
Not much around here, while it is tolerated for accessing something over the Web, the cyber security trainings explicitly mention being a possible way for job termination when something goes wrong, after installing anything not cleared by IT.
May be the opposite, but BYOD is a thing and has the same result, security-wise…
Yeah, I almost suspect a lot of these cases are BYOD (like the above commenter who said 70% of the Zoom interviews he hosted showed the candidate using their current company's Zoom account). I just can't imagine there are that many people dumb enough to interview on a "work computer" otherwise. In the world of small or less tech savvy companies, BYOD is pretty common.
Usually BYOD requires IT clearance and installation of the same management software like company devices.
A lot of people just think laptop == laptop.
At several companies I’ve seen folks run torrents to watch movies at work.
Once I was on a Zoom call, and I noticed music production software on my colleagues computer.
When I pointed it out, they responded with something like “ Ohh, my kids make music.”
Neat, I guess.
>Ohh, my kids make music.
It is one thing to do personal things on a work laptop, it is another all together to give your children free reign. Are there no penal measures taken to deter this anymore?
The penal measure is too late, it should have been penally applied before child was conceived.
> A lot of people just think laptop == laptop.
We are talking about highly educated people who work in software development (i.e. can assumed to have some minimum viable knowledge about computers), and not about the dumbest imaginable users.
> Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed.
-Darth Vader.
Being able to make React components does not require you to be smarter than the average person.
You also have multiple types of intelligence. I worked with a brilliant intern once. The kid was over 100k in student loan debt and didn’t know the loans can’t get discharged.
They can be discharged if you are determined to be disabled by a doctor and live for 3 years below the poverty income limit.
The bar for that is extremely high.
They can garnish Social Security if you default on Student Loans.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-much-social-security-garnis...
SWE's are the worst about security, I swear most are worse than the average person when it comes to security practices.
"Need some new software" = "Download it from some random website"
"Software won't run" = "Turn off AV and get it everything permission"
"Still won't run" = "run as root"
> SWE's are the worst about security, I swear most are worse than the average person when it comes to security practices.
My experience is completely different: many software developers are rather paranoid with respect to security, and have quite a good (though far from expert-level) knowledge about security. It's rather that many software developers are quite hostile to security practices that are mostly "security theater" and obstructs them in doing their work.
The following Reddit post
> https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1e8do2...
and the top answer
> https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1e8do2...
describe the mindset that I observe rather well.
It's an anecdote, but one of my coworkers has Steam installed on his MacBook (of all computers). He is a data scientist. Technically, we're only allowed to install software from an approved list maintained by the IT security team. They clearly aren't enforcing that policy, though.
Don't worry, they'll enforce it when someone installs something unapproved and it causes a problem.
> We are talking about highly educated people
That's a bit of charity isn't it? Lot's of people in tech that really not that clever even if they are smart. Also, people in HR aren't as tech savvy.
Nearly all people who work in tech have a university degree, many even a PhD.
Except for the bosses like Zuckerberg, Jobs, Wozniak, Gates....
Do I need to go on?
Thanks for the laughs.
No, 'people who work in software development' != 'highly educated people' and those both != 'understand how computers work'.
> highly educated people who work in software development
> dumbest imaginable users.
They are often one and the same.
I do almost everything on my work macbook, including typing this comment, because it is faster than my own and has a nicer screen.
I know people grinding leetcode on work laptops, during working times, at the office, for interviews at other companies.
This is definitely my approach. I won't log into _anything personal_ from my company equipment. Not even stuff like Spotify, anymore.
I also refuse to install Intune or similar on my personal hardware. Keep work and personal like oil and water!
This!
I don't know how people are ok using their personal accounts on work-laptops full of spyware.
I've worked for a couple companies whose stance on me having a linux work laptop was "fine, but you have to support yourself".
So despite it being a "company" computer I personally installed the blank SSD and installed Arch on it and did not install any company spyware.
I was perfectly comfortable also having Steam installed so I could entertain myself on the plane on business trips. I knew everything installed and spyware wasn't on the list.
When I work at companies that have MDM set up on my computer, I don't do that.
Sure, but that's not really going to protect you. Could easily be that you are the interviewer and the interviewee asks you to click on sketchy link, or it could easily just be a call with a fake supplier or sales representative. It maybe makes it a little bit harder, but there's still many ways for social engineering to land something on work computers.
It's convenient. I'm not lugging two laptops around!
It's dumb ideas all the way down, starting with the fact that this work laptop had a direct path to a multi-billion dollar signing environment.
Some workers can't afford personal laptops. There was a layoff announced today where company told workers to keep their company issued computers. Imagine that.
Often this is solely fault of employers not paying their workers enough.
I agree with the principle but I think reading HN is fine...
Yes, but are the companies clear enough and paying enough so that people would never use their work computers for personal matters?
I have a personal desktop because I grew up with video games and a desktop was always a personal investment. I never had a personal laptop, I cannot justify the cost (not a trivial expense, even if my work title is extremely fancy it does not pay on par), so if I would be traveling I would have to take the only laptop I have with me - the work laptop. Well, I managed to never use it, I don't take it with me, but there is a lot of effort in that.
In such a company I would give employees 2 laptops and 2 phones, one set for work only, one set for personal use only, then I would fire on the spot anyone mixing the usage. That would be a start in a longer journey of protecting the company.
Well so-rry but if you give me a macbook powerful enough to play cyberpunk 2077 on it, that's what I'm gonna do.
At least dual-boot a second OS that they have no control over.
I highly doubt that a company will like that you dual boot their machines.
Interviewing for another company on your work laptop is levels of idgaf I can't achieve
lol maybe the employees wanted the company to see it.
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.
I remember in the mid-90s going to an interview in Manhattan - pre-Internet. Someone met me and led me to a table and said, "Here's where you're going to take your test." I said, "I don't take tests." She said "Everyone that comes in takes the test". I said, "Well, that's no longer true because I came in and I'm leaving without taking the test"
While I love the "edgy-ness" of this, I remember doing something like this around 2013 in Manhattan and kind of enjoyed it. They had me go into a room, and gave me a paper with an open ended question: it was something along the lines of, write as much detail as I could about what happens when a user visits a URL in a web browser. E.g. explain as much as I know about TCP, HTTP requests, web servers, etc. I think I touched on how Cookies worked as well.
No AI, no leet code, just old fashioned gauging someone's experience and communication skills.
My first job interview in 1989 after college:
Them: "Do you know TCP/IP?". Me: "Yes". Them: "you're hired"
Job at the Westinghouse instrumenting nuclear power plants. Simpler times then.
I love this test and will dive deep into switch debouncing on keyboards when they press the enter key.
I did this as a test in 2018! Compares to the leetcode screens now, it was a dream
I'm fine with technical interviews that are "test-like", with questions and answers and discussion and with an engineer who is my technical equal. But this was not that.
The more inhumane the screener the worse the job in my experience.
Had one recently that waived me thru and then sent me straight to talking to senior management/stakeholders/etc but literally no one on the team itself.
Couldn’t get a straight answer as to what team does, what role is for, real day to day I’d be walking.
Only clear thing was scale of architectural mess stemming from a political mess… and not a lot of interest in changing it.
They wanted a seasoned tech body to throw into the grinder 12-15hr days to replace the last one. No thanks.
I'm confused, I'm probably missing here something.
By 'test' you mean a school-type paper exam, questions and answers? (On unspecified topics.)
Why would you refuse that, when applying to a job?
And I bet you both came away from that interview feeling like you’d dodged a bullet. The interviewer just as much as yourself.
That's how I react to companies wanting personality tests.
Wow how tough.
I honestly don't know what's so wrong about taking a test for a job, unless the job already requires some kind of certifications/licenses. I, personally, wish that my doctors and lawyers have passed some tests.
More often than not the test is at best tangentially related to the role.
At worst it’s the biggest hardos on the team writing a bunch of brain teasers and gotchas as a hazing ritual.
Hey, one day the fate of the company is going to hinge on getting an accurate estimate of how many ping pong balls can fit into a 747, and they'll be glad that they asked the right brainteasers.
I had one recently that was like.. I'd be better at this test if I knew less / was less experienced.
An hour to implement a toy version of a component which, the last time I did it "in real life" blew everyone away that I had a prototype ready in 1 day. That real life prototype went through weeks and weeks of iteration before it was even useful, and everyone was happy with that. But yeah that's something to time box to 1 hour in an interview environment.
So turns into an exercise of - which of the 100 pitfalls/nuances do they want me to pretend don't exist in order to complete it in 1 hour. Opinions vary!
There were multiple questions of this form.
One could pass this test blindly as a new grad not knowing the 100 pitfalls of actually building one in real life.
> I honestly don't know what's so wrong about taking a test for a job, unless the job already requires some kind of certifications/licenses.
You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time. So it's very annoying to do some test over and over again for every job application.
> You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time. So it's very annoying to do some test over and over again for every job application.
Ok, but there's no uniform grading in school or employment. We all know people who managed to get through university without learning anything and manage to hold a job in software development without knowing or doing anything. It'd be nice if a degree and a job history guaranteed competence, but it doesn't.
Lots of professions can bring a portfolio and/or a sample of their work, but most software developers can't because the work is often propriatary and a trade secret, and anyway would need a lot of specific setup to operate.
I've only taken test tests for government jobs, and they were laughably outdated; approximately nobody knew how much space was on a 5 1/4" floppy in 1998 when I took the test, but they were asking about 8" floppies, and I assume they still are, because the test had to go through some process and doing a new test would be expensive. But yeah, I expect a company to validate that I can both describe solutions to problems and turn that description into code.
> You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time
Yep. Now substitute doctors/lawyers/accountants/civil engineers into the equation and see how you feel about it.
Surely they don't take a test for every client, but I'd consider the interview process more like a "workaround" for the lack of standardized tests for software engineers instead of the lack of respect.
Excellent choice! No amount of money feels as good as claiming the respect you deserve.
Haha owned
It's also for liability. If someone comes in with the intention of suing them, they can point to the test and have objective evidence that the rejection was not based on race or gender. It also allows them to gather data after the employee gets established and succeeds or fails.
Also in the mid 90s, you actually had to be smart to work in this field. There was no stack overflow or reddit to search. And CS programs were nascent.
Companies certainly have taken it too far, but I don't blame them for some usage of standard tests.
I know several companies that are pulling SecOps resources in to vet candidates now. It's rough out there.
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.
Agreed, LinkedIn makes it very easy to spoof your credentials. There was a fake profile posing as a recruiter from my company trying to phish people for a long time, we reported it 100x and nothing happened. Finally ran into a guy at a party who worked for LinkedIn and convinced him to flag it internally, lol
LinkedIn is a wasteland. Guarantee Microsoft leadership forgets it exists or that they own it. The sooner we stop giving it misplaced respect the sooner it can be replaced by something better.
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 As 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.
Let's not victim blame plz
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.
Can you provide more information on your email filtering agent?
How would the North Koreans profit from hacking grandma's PC?
It’s not the pc. It will be over the phone. They will call, use TTS with voice cloning to impersonate someone in their family, 5 seconds is all you need. Do a bank transfer to this address. Or click on this link we send you now over sms. You do a million of those.
Depends on who the grandma is and how patient they are. If you were somehow connected to a network that could be accessed to transfer billions of dollars, your grandma or your partners grandma or someone you trust IRL might be a potential target. Or if not them, then someone they trust.
Compromise the pc and use it a zombie for other ops. That's one example.
No one wants to talk about the "internal AI Tool" being used to elevate to not 1 but 2 DevOps engineers?
> use of an internal AI tool as a springboard. The attacker leveraged the compromised computer of engineer B and used an internal AI tool to gain control over the Wallet DevOps Engineer A and another Wallet Software Engineer C. The attacker soon discovered Wallet DevOps Engineer A had a container deployment permission token on his computer.
With the AI craze going on recently I've worked at multiple companies where an internal AI tool was vibecoded and I've always been worried about the security implications.
This article tells me that even if there were no north korean hackers, an engineer within the company had access to move billions of dollars in funds.
That is a huge red flag, and reflects on binance internal security. I would be wary of dealing with this company,
Anec-data - as an interviewer, last year, I had my first sketchy, perhaps 'North Korean', candidate.
The name on the CV, was, for the sake of privacy, Michael Smith, from Australia, and ticked the right boxes.
We'd expect a fluent, Aussie-accented English speaker. Instead, we had a candidate with a webcam that wouldn't work (weird!!), with clearly accented English of a East-Asian background. I suppose there's a vanishing chance they really were Mike Smith of Adelaide or wherever, but we couldn't take that chance. We tried rescheduling, but tumbleweeds...
Haha I had the exact same interview experience, the candidate was named Connor Wood, from Austin, TX. I actually told them we couldn't continue the interview unless they turned on their webcam. Cut to a meek east asian man in a dimly lit room. Are you sure you're the Connor Wood that played on the UT Austin Lacrosse team?? LOL I don't know how they expected that ruse to work.
I’m sure there were other signs of sketchiness, but in case you weren’t aware there actually IS a sizable Chinese population in Australia (esp Melbourne)
I'm waiting for companies to start running remote screens like "OK, in this exercise, we need you to write a program that efficiently generates insults about Kim Jong Un."
The way I read the Binance post[0] is that the first mistake was "Engineer A from Wallet DevOps" clicking on a malicious Google ad[1]. If Google didn't provide that attack vector, maybe this wouldn't have happened that time.
[0] https://www.binance.com/en/blog/community/322915344375956676...
[1] https://isc.sans.edu/diary/32942
It's getting really confusing with these online job offers, including interviews and assignments. Various people are pretending to be recruiters. I've basically stopped answering phone calls, and everything goes to voicemail unless the caller is in my contacts. But that is hard to do if you are looking for a job. Honestly, if you are the target of this type of campaign, as described in this article, there is probably a good chance you will get compromised, even if you are normally careful.
Imagine being able to steal billions in crypto from your work laptop and using same laptop to run code sent to you by another company. I wish I had their problems.
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...
No single person, especially an engineer, should have the ability to transfer funds. That's nuts and it says a lot about the security posture of that company.
Why did the employee have direct access to $6.3 billion in customer funds?
No directly, but he could deploy code that had access to customers' wallets. Which is even worse.
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.
Source posted earlier: "29 October Binance Security Incident: Initial Findings and Response Update" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50359377
Pretty lame of The Register not to reference the original source.
> Pretty lame of The Register not to reference the original source.
They did, in their sentence "the incident report said".
Running interview assignment on a work computer… tsk tsk
at the very least, run it inside a docker container (making sure of network and volumes i would say)
Hindsight is 20/20. Although why aren't assignments just a pdf
"This code has multiple faults. Your task is to find and fix them all."
didn't specify the eng's role but oh the irony if the assignment was for a SecOps job :)
This is what I was trying to figure out. Did they think it was for an internal role or something?
Some people just make really dumb decisions.
Like giving people direct access to $6.3 billion?
It was rather indirect access.
> Binance’s endpoint security tools did not immediately detect the malware.
Yes of course they didn't. The whole "endpoint security" industry is a scam. They're attempting to (or attempting to appear to) solve an impossible problem. All they do is install spyware and backdoors, reducing security rather than enhancing it.
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.
Further evidence that 1) recruiting is broken and 2) developers make great targets, and we need to respond accordingly.
The practice of installing software during a job interview should be forbidden by law.
Some companies require you to install Windows remote administration tools (basically root kits) on your machine to check whether you are using search engines or AI. It is insane.
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.
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
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.
You must be fun at parties.
These are simply malicious interviews, not fake. If your company is important enough, you've got one or two inside already.
Good thing they didn't get anything important.
How do these dumb people that have access to billions of funds fall to these fake interviews?
You don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes. Maybe the interviewer thinks they are hiring for a real job.
I think we have reached peak whatever we're in. I think from here on out, things are gonna change.
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.
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.
Founder of Callstrike here .. we build real time deepfake & voice impersonation attack simulation tools for a living so this is literally what I deal with every day.
The biggest irony is that we get at least a couple of signups every month from South Korea, Russia, India, Nigeria just to try getting access to our platform for running these attacks ..
Here is the most recent copy paste from a Calendly invite ..
>Invitee Email: >ashley@cairnsovereign.net
>Invitee Time Zone: >Central European Time
>Questions:
>Please share anything that will help prepare for our meeting.
>We are an MSP from the UK that is look for a deepfake platform to run campaigns for our clients. We typically use open source software but there is a gap in our portfolio for deepfake testing that we can't fill with our usual open source philosophy.
The company website https://www.cairnsovereign.net/ was registered just 2 days ago .. they have no linkedin presence, fake CEO and fake CTO and fake everything ..
I still accepted the invite and joined and the person has a strong northern british accent .. he askd me to let his AI bot join the call to take notes ... i refused .. to which he swore and said that if a meeting bot is not allowed .. then i dont want to talk and abruptly hung up ...
PS: if anyone wants to see .. this is what a real time voice impersonation call and real time deepfake faceswap .. looks like ..
https://www.callstrike.ai/deepfake-security-training
https://www.callstrike.ai/voice-phishing-simulator
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.
Pretty sure it was his last job interview ever
Pretty sure he's going to be doing a lot of job interviews very soon
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.
People are talk about all the security aspects of this which are all valid. But what I saw here is that Binance is running a sweatshop here. So even someone holding secret for billions is actively looking for potential role from a Noname company.
There is no evidence given that North Korea did this.
"TRM attributes this attack to TraderTraitor, North Korea’s premier hacking unit. We base this assessment on robust on and off-chain intelligence sources. The FBI named the same group as responsible for the USD 1.5 billion Bybit hack in February 2025. Several features of this attack match earlier North Korea-linked heists, including the Bybit hack and the KelpDAO hack in April 2026: small Tornado Cash withdrawals funding an operator wallet, staging that began well before the theft, and signatures obtained in advance then executed in one burst. The laundering observed so far, built on large swaps through market makers and lending protocols, differs from the bridge-heavy pattern that followed Bybit. TRM will share further findings as the investigation develops."
https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/north-korea-steals-us...
This is simply an assertion that an official enemy did something we don't like. It could just as well be a CIA money laundering scheme. This would make more sense, given the wider deployment of US cyber weapons and assets as well as the desire of North Korea not to provoke American aggression which previously murdered about 20% of their population.
It is widely known America has cyberweapons deployed around the globe. It is likely trivial for them to fake a trail of evidence from the DPRK.
Where do these people find jobs so secure that they wouldn’t bat an eye at interviewing for another job in a context where their current employer can watch them do so?
Even if you don’t understand the security concerns of running some 3rd party’s scripts on a work device, more pedestrian situational awareness should have prevented such a wild misjudgment?
If you want to learn more about the Lazarus group behind this heist, the BBC did an excellent podcast on another one of their operations:
https://www.bbc.com/audio/series/w27vqd03
(It's also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc)
Am I the only one baffled by the fact that the engineer uses a work PC for a personal job interview assignment?
Probably. I have seen many colleagues across the cubicle aisles spending their time on things completely unrelated to their work. I would be baffled to hear that you have not had similar experiences.
Well I've done the same too. But I would not use my work PC.
Absolutely. Yet as a hiring manager, I see it all the time.
As a hiring manager, do you hold that behavior against candidates for positions where poor security practices could become a major liability for your company?
I don't even use my home PC for interviews, but instead use a refurbed laptop with a clean OS install.
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
insert “Oh no! Anyway…” Jeremy Clarkson meme
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.
What are these zoom exploits?
Letting lowbies have any credentials that can escalate to the vault is what what led to the heist.
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.
I wouldn't buy that either. Evidence can be faked and North Korea is a convenient actor to blame, that's all.
The lawsuits are coming, and the systems have logs. There is no incentive to lie about technical details that will come out in discovery in due course.
Don't forget that logs can be faked unless they are obtained directly by law enforcement forensic teams. In the case of Binance EU, their parent company is an offshore entity outside the direct reach of US and EU authorities. Consequently, anything Binance says or presents will most probably be taken as-is by western courts.
Another important note is that Binance has a strong incentive to cover up certain details, given that the company itself is anything but transparent. They also control CoinMarketCap, where they promote only projects that serve their own interests, while rejecting legitimate projects due to Binance's conflicts of interest. Several public reports and data document these practices.
Well, the alternative to blaming it on an interview is to admit that system is insecure. Admitting that kills the company right off the bat
You can fake logs.
Oh, don't you know about this?
Google any of these names: Sam Bankman-Fried, Jordan Belfort, Elizabeth Holmes, Kenneth Lay, Bernie Madoff or Jeffrey Skilling.
Man, you're going to have fun reading about what they did!
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50353818
>> "...and is working with law enforcement, blockchain intel firms, and security researchers to trace and freeze the assets. The crypto exchange has also hired independent cybersecurity experts to conduct a cybersecurity review of the incident, and recommend additional protective measures."
>> trace and freeze the assets
It has gotten to the point where the advertised permanence of cryptocoin transactions is a serous national security threat, literally funneling $6+billion to a nation-state whose publicly avowed statements is to destroy the US to fund its nuclear weapons program.
The party is ending. The house lights are flashing. Crypto will either become controlled so illegitimate transactions will be roll-back-able (presumably with proper court or NatSec orders), or it will be banned.
This is already a reality. USDT, USDC, and many other smart contracts allow for the freezing of funds worldwide. Arbitrum rolls back its chain whenever it wants. State-sponsored Twitter influencers like Taylor Monahan (tayvano_), Zachary Wolk (ZachXBT), and Nick Bax (bax1337), falsely flagged as independent, publicly appeal to Thorchain (the only decentralized swap protocol between various native on-chain assets) to integrate transaction screening directly into the node consensus. EU has made accepting Monero illegal starting in 2027, among many other measures. Western governments have already succeeded in making crypto very controllable.
Anybody who thinks this can be prevented from happening again is deluding themselves. I'm looking forward to the MSTR heist writeup when it happens.
I love these guys!
This is insane. The first engineer ran some curl bash, which gave the hackers access to his Slack, and then they set up an interview for him at a fake company and during that interview, they convinced an engineer to download and install some code they had written? This is just clown world.
A lot of detail on what Engineer A, B and C did. But this would've been prevented if Engineer A didn't have "a container deployment permission token on his computer".
What the fuck? On a target as big as Binance? Every developer should be treated as a liability and never be able to deploy by themselves.
Move fast and break things. 4-eyes principle is for brick-and-mortar banks stuck in the prehistoric past of paper money. /s
Guy probably skipped his "mandatory" KnowBe4 training... see HR actually does serve a purpose! /s
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..
Not as easy as that, these can be real people with genuine businesses across the other side of the world, which sounds like what happened here. They only have to seem friendly and genuine before asking you to perform a coding test or whatever.
Unfortunately:
1) The dev downloaded it onto a work laptop which was really poor behaviour
2) It sounds like the developer environment was very open instead of segmented. Common but an easy control to use in a high-risk environment.
3) Sounds like a lack of any elevation process e.g. if a developer needed to access a wallet, it very much should sound an alarm/require explicit permission etc.
But it is easy to be wise in hindsight.
It seems in this case really poor behaviour and practices, I can imagine some security engineer shouting I told you so pretty loudly.
On the other end, when doing interviews I suspect 40-50% of candidates use AI assistant tools (might be skewed in tech).
I do miss seeing someone's camera feed break or AI tool break down mid interview.
If she hadn't done it on her work laptop, her personal would have been pwned anyway. It's not clear to me how to protect oneself while also looking for work.
…what? That’s not how this works. You don’t get to misuse company resources for the purpose of transferring the risks associated with your personal activities from yourself to your employer.
Of course not. I'm asking how to protect oneself during personal activities.
I think we need to implement a new handshake protocol for job interviews.
Both candidate and recruiter have to call Kim Jong Un a big fat tosser (other swearwords are available) on a recorded video before the interview continues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7v2clX8ynE