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Comment by AlexITC | Hacker News Reader

I have saw companies doing social engineering as part of their intrution testing, I imagine fake interviews are (or will become) part of these.

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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.

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.

What pentesters can do, should do, and often do is simply start the test from a workstation that is given to them - you assume a successful social engineering attack as the starting point, and test whether your process and technical controls can properly limit the impact of such a compromise without trying to replicate the actual social engineering step and the associated disruption to the targeted employees.

Taking over that first engineer's workstation shouldn't ever have resulted in $6.3B of damages. I would consider it reasonable if those privileges could be abused (by e.g. the same engineer intentionally) to cause $6.3M of damages and the rest would be mitigated or prevented; so for this incident we could say that 0.1% of the impact was caused by the initial compromise of that workstation and 99.9% of the losses were caused by all the other failures - so it's effective for any pentest to focus on the latter part, ignore the social engineering and phishing part (since you can't really eliminate it anyway - unlike many other flaws) and assume initial compromise as a starting point.

Pen testers generally won’t physically assault your employees, bring guns and wave them around or shoot people, or kidnap their family members and torture them until they do what they want. What’s your point? Nothing.

I think my security form said something along the lines of “using personal laptops to access company resources grants implicit permission for my company to audit my laptop.” It goes on to explain that if you don’t agree to it, simply use the company device only.

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.

Well also to test that they don't just casually drop corporate secrets...

fake interviews might be excessive but lots of companies send tempting phishing emails as part of the secops, then both collect org-level stats and educate (or shame depending on your take) the employee for getting duped.

> 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.

If your laptop is successfully compromised by the pentesters then pretty much by definition you weren't being responsible. Though I agree that pentesters going after personal devices is ethically dubious.

Compromising employee personal devices is strictly out of scope for any security testing I've seen.

> Though I agree that pentesters going after personal devices is ethically dubious.

It's not just ethically dubious. It crosses a lot of legal boundaries. A company can consent to have their personal devices hacked. An employee doesn't automatically consent to let a company's contractors access their personal devices.

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.

I think it would be legal but unethical -- unless you also then gave the employee substantial compensation for their time and opportunity cost.

And you never, ever, ever install software as part of the interview. Decline and hang up if they're asking you to install stuff. Visiting websites - maybe but even that unless it's a well known website I wouldn't go there but download and install stuff, hells no

"fork this repo and fix this bug" is a common job interview request, isn't it?

For many build chains, that involves implicitly installing software.

Such toolchains are dumpster fires whose use invites supply chain attacks. They should never have gained mainstream acceptance and should never be run outside of a sandbox.

That said I wouldn't trust a compiler to be hardened against malicious input and anyway you presumably need to run the output so all of that should be happening in a hardened sandbox regardless.

Hmm like building an node project, actually any project can have a dependency on a made up libraries that does the exploitation or even the project itself as made infamous by chrome extensions

I fully agree with this.

If you ever meet with Alibaba for any reason they'll ask you to download their conference software. Unfortunately most people in the China ecosystem don't have the guts to say no and will just gleefully install any .exe thrown at them.

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.

Only if your manager is an incompetent moron.

Which is also why we, collectively, as an industry needs to not put up with that. It's easy for me to say from the comfort of it not being my job on the line, that if this happens to anybody they should quit and then name and shame the company, but a competent security team is going to have the idea of doing a fake phishing interview and then not do it because of how morale destroying that would be. The security awareness team sending fake phishing emails are embarrassing enough.

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