North Korean cryptocurrency thieves tricked a Binance software engineer into downloading malware onto their work-issued computer during a fake job interview process before last week’s record-breaking $6.3 billion heist.
In an incident report published on Tuesday, the cryptocurrency exchange said several techniques - including social engineering via fake job interviews, malware downloads, compromised internal AI tooling, endpoint takeover, and an “advanced transaction-authorization method” - led to the October 29 security breach.
“Our current investigation indicates that this was a sophisticated, multi-stage campaign,” the incident report said. “It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident.”
Over the weekend, the FBI attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking operation linked to Lazarus Group, known for combining espionage with massive cryptocurrency heists. The Pyongyang-backed crew is also highly adept at job market scams - both posing as IT workers, who are then hired by Western companies, and as potential employers to lure software engineers into downloading malware and infecting corporate devices.
Still, who the heck takes a job interview call on their office laptop??
I assumed they were doing the interview and sent the employee an updated cv or similar, but I was wrong
Fr, why use your current work laptop?
Because you are trying to get a new job so fuck your current employer :D
But for real, I admit I actually did this since the interview time was during working hours and I am then, well, at work.
I don’t like taking a whole or half day off for an interview, so yeah. But I get that this is not possible for everyone.
I guess there is a point of giving no fucks you reach at some point, yeah. I’ve used the parking lot, but I was connected to different wifi.
The last time I had a work laptop, I did have to make an appointment with IT for them to install Firefox, because we couldn’t download any programs and it only came with chrome. It was incredibly annoying, but I guess I can appreciate it a little more now (but for real, why the appointment?).
Thinking about it more thoroughly though, I downloaded probably about 30k lawsuit filings over the course of my job there. Most were from trustworthy sources, but sometimes they were just in document repositories arranged by law firms.
I hope they have some way of securing that 🙃