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To me that means Amazon can and will monitor every keystroke of every employee.
Yep, thats corporate monitoring software for you. Everyones got it, if you dont see it, assume its there. If the PC is not yours and or built with your own hands, assume its bugged or key logged. This goes for school PCs as well for the youngins, this is not to make people paranoid, just manage expectations on privacy. If you didnt make it, assume its recorded.
Sorta like north korea then. Understandable why they got the job… Must have felt like home.
This is the real story.
Worked at Google and can confirm if you typed your password into a non org website you were flagged and asked to reset your PW. The problem is some of the training websites Google used and were Google branded were apparently non org websites. But it shows they are looking for “certain key strokes”
My employer does the same over a proxy. Luckily it can’t breach HTTPS, but it was annoying to set all my APs and router and switches and other network nodes to HTTPS just because the damn thing would block the site the moment I sent my password in cleartext to a local device…
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set all my APs and router and switches and other network nodes to HTTPS
What does that mean? HTTPS is a client-server thing, your APS and switches don’t really have anything to do with that.
Web control panel. All my network runs OpenWrt and I prefer to manage it from the web UI instead of terminal tinkering.
Ahh that makes sense. I thought you were claiming you somehow got all your traffic over HTTPS with some AP settings.
Setting their management interfaces to be accessed via https because the VPN blocks (after snooping on) http only access would be my guess
You’re sure they aren’t decrypting your traffic? Check the root cert of any site and see if it’s their own root.
Yep, they’re not decrypting HTTPS, I’ve triple checked. But we do have an MDM forced proxy service that does check any non-encrypted traffic…
This is definitely a thing.
Only if the site they’re visiting isn’t using HSTS, but it’s possible
I don’t think this is correct. HSTS only prevents downgrading.
Annoying, but ideally it would have been the initial configuration
I mean, more like does and has been, but I guess that’s just semantics. Evil gon be evil.
It wasn’t the lag from the employee’s computer to Amazon which was being monitored.
It was the lag from the hacker to the employee. Amazon could not have monitored the hacker’s computer.
I’m kind of surprised the latency was that low. Unless the NK “employee” was spoofing being in SK or something.
The article says he was remotely controlling a company laptop located in Arizona. A woman located in AZ was facilitating the NK workers, but she was recently charged with the fraud.
How was he hired 🤯 ? It’s a skill
There was a scam going where they would offer for someone to apply for a role and use that good candidates clean information to get it v they would do the work and split the pay with the person who’s info they used.
In exchange that person would get “job experience”, the perks of WFH, and the ability to hold down more than one of these figurehead jobs simultaneously.
Why didn’t my guidance counselor tell me this was an option it sounds perfect for me!
Probably because it gets you in trouble with the feds.
Probably worked for next to no pay.
How did Amazon know the lag?
Probably a remote kvm system with QOS monitoring. Many secure systems won’t let you connect directly to sensitive resources from your personal workstation.
But the infiltrator hacked the remote worker’s computer.
The actual worker may have been require to use…
https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/desktop-as-a-service/
But the lag from the infiltrator to that is what was detected. There was presumably no Amazon software installed on the infiltrator’s computer so how can the lag be measured?
Keyboard input over kvm is pretty awful. It’s possible the kvm software was enforcing a delay between keystrokes to make sure they are delivered in order. Seeing keys consistently pressed with 500ms separation would be odd.
Perhaps something like time between key pressed and key released being abnormally high? Or erratic mouse movement?
I know whenever a PC I’m using is being remotely controlled, the mouse jerks around instead of moving smoothly around the screen. I’d imagine that gets even worse with ping/more layers of remote connections.
Yes but you need access to the culprit’s computer for the lag measurement.
Amazon security experts took a closer look at the flagged ‘U.S. remote worker’ and determined that their remote laptop was being remotely controlled – causing the extra keystroke input lag.
With access to the final remote desktop, and access to the workers laptop you know the delay from these two so if there is more delay, then you can infer it’s coming from somewhere else? I’m sure there are more paths too but access to the North Koreans hardware doesn’t seem required
also, time between key presses on the compromised machine could indicate network lag to what is actually a Remote Desktop.
Also worth pointing out that this was a flagged employee (probably from something like data access logs) so they would be under more scrutiny and surveillance than the average employee
No. I’m talking about measuring the time in-between inputs being received over the remote connection. Purely observation from the receiver side of the connection.
Network overhead + dropped and re-sent packets, introducing unusual lag in between commands/keystrokes.
A key being pressed and key being released are two separate events that get transmitted separately and usually happen pretty close together. That gap getting larger, due to the long-distance connection introducing lag, could be what they were looking at.
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I have no idea what that means.
Let’s see if Amazon gets trump to yell at Un.
