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Comment by yubblegum | Hacker News Reader

The article says that a software engineer interviewed with the North Koreans and the NKs then gained access to engineer A's machine (which had the deployment token) and then finally passed that token to run on engineer C's machine (who apparently did deployments). They knew of the team makeup from their first (caught) attempt.

That unlettered (npi) engineer who downloaded and ran the interview software on his or her machine is what the human weak link here. Let's call them Engineer F. Seems like this person was specifically selected from the dev team.

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I've had this happen a few times getting interview requests from Indian recruiting firms. It sounded familiar. You go through a screening, then get passed onto the "code challenge" part. You have to download a GitHub file and then work on it, check it back in and push it so they can examine what you did.

Twice I scanned the file after downloading it to a sandbox and twice it found malware that would've been installed.

While this is by far the worst case of this happening, I've read at least a half dozen other accounts of recruiting companies attempting to install malware through the same process. I'm not saying the person should have known, but it's scary this is becoming more and more common.

> I'm not saying the person should have known

This person definitely should have known. You don't download and run arbitrary binaries outside of a VM. At this point you don't even compile code from an untrusted source. This is the power user equivalent of falling for a phishing email.

One of my favorite stories from a security talk was the speaker recounting the surrealism of (while doing a forensic investigation of a security incident) watching the attacker read your internal documentation to try to figure out how the hell anything works mid-attack, and running into all the same pitfalls as your new employees.

That suggests a creative new justification for not documenting your code :p

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