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- Hacker News
- That was a fun read, I wonder if vscode would still load the script if you click “don’t trust author”? That being said, can you embed something yourself and push the commit?by syntaxing
- > I wonder if vscode would still load the script if you click “don’t trust author”
It doesn't. VSCode dev replied here on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46719712.
But, I don't think anybody pays attention to the workspace trust. When ".vscode" has launch commands, it should rather say, "Trusting this workspace runs the following command on your behalf" or something similar.
by CITIZENDOT - There was a funny video I saw recently someone's running Red Star OS on their computer and a scammer is trying to scam them thinking it's Windows
Unrelated to this git pre commit hook attack but yeah
by ge96 - I assume these types of things are going to become more and more common.
Looks like these folks really did their homework.
It's nasty, but I have to respect their skills. I'll bet it works, quite often.
- Their "skills" might just be borrowed from some LLM.by LoganDark
- yea, i had fun looking around, this felt like a ctf challenge lol. if they had any vuln on their server, it would've been even better.by CITIZENDOT
- If LinkedIn actually cared about preventing scams, they could implement verification using company emails if you want to list your current employment. And if it is too much of a heavy burden, then at the minimum you should have it as an optional feature that recruiters would have to comply with, if they want to be legitimate.
- Myself and my friends have for years created fake profiles to catfish recruiters and companies to find out what job reqs they have open and what they're looking for in a candidate. When JS frameworks got huge, it was really helpful to separate the legit companies and recruiters from the scammers.
I would imagine a lot of what went on then, is going on now with all the AI jobs and demand for people who have even a cursory knowledge of LLM's and automation.
- > they could implement verification using company emails
they added this back in 2023 (https://news.linkedin.com/2023/april/linkedin-s-new-verifica...), but very less people actually bother to verify with their email, so not having it doesn't always mean it's illegitimate.
by CITIZENDOT - Hmm, did anyone else have issues loading the screenshots here? I had to open most of them in a new tab to see them.
Regardless, that's a pretty sneaky scam, and definitely something that caught out a ton of would be candidates in the past. What's more, the Visual Studio Code project mentioned in the article sounds even more horrifying. Like, the tool seriously lets you run custom code whenever someone opens your project? That feels like a really blatant malware vector that should probably have at least some sort of security mitigation...
It's also rather worrying how little these job sites are doing about scams like this too. I get it, it's perhaps a bit difficult to catch out all kinds of wrongdoing here. But you'd think it'd be simple enough to restrict accounts from claiming to be associated with a company or organisation if there's no proof they work there. At the moment, you can basically claim to work for any company you like, or that you have any type degree from any institution under the sun. If this was verified in any real way, and messages had a large warning at the top if the original claiming to be from an organisation wasn't confirmed to work there, a lot of scams would far more difficult to pull off.
by CM30 - everything is hosted on github pages, i'll have to use some cdn for images.by CITIZENDOT
- updated my website to use jsdeliver CDN for article images. thanks for pointing out.by CITIZENDOT
- It's like Microsoft forgot about all the malware that was promulgated by Word and Excel macros that would run automatically when you opened a document.by SoftTalker
- always a good day when we get an a post on front actually related to hacking on hackernews.by nphardon
- thanks!by CITIZENDOT
- Except hackernews is about different kind of hackers.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
> 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.
> 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
by ivanjermakov - > Side note: Why use a raw IP address? If anything, this screams “malware.” At least register a decoy domain like lint-checker.com or jenkins-ci-runner.net. If the threat actors who wrote this are reading: take notes people!
Maybe they don't want to give any identifying info to the domain registrar? Or just minimizing their online presence?
by lantry - fair pointby CITIZENDOT
- Or possibly these hosts fell victims of their malware, too, and see now used as proxies.by cromka
- That's probably the reason bare IP addresses are associated with sketchy stuff.by HPsquared
- My takeaway from this was that Claude was being completely useless as a helper Thanks to all the safety safeguards and that nonsense.by vardalab
- > Why use a raw IP address? If anything, this screams “malware.”
If the victim is deep enough to check hook's content, it's unlikely they will just stop here losing suspicion. I'm sure most devs wouldn't think that doing `git commit` can be malicious (git security oversight?).
by ivanjermakov - > git security oversight?
Executing downloaded code without prior review always is these days, regardless of the tool that does it.
by zombot - if you just clone a repo no githooks are every automatically enabled. but since this was downloaded not cloned it's a different storyby zeratax
- > They embedded a script that checks the victim’s host operating system and silently executes a remote payload.
Seems like this is becoming a recurring theme, similar story was on the front page last month.
by wxw - The OP says as much, and links to a Google Search results that says the same.by gowld
- Recently there seems to be an uptick in North-Korean attacks against developers. In addition to this type of attack, which has been going on for years, I recently get ~1 email a week from North Korean hackers. It's always a "Hello, I found your profile, want to collaborate?" e-mail.
Discord communities I am in for programming are similar. People show up and within a few days either ask for a job or suggest cooperation. Sure, you could argue these Discord people may actually be out of a job (in this economy, very likely), but the volume and similarity of the messages say otherwise. You can also tell people show up in... _weird places_ to ask for jobs. An example being the Discord community for a not-really-used Python library with ~0 actual activity - either this person is very bad at finding good places to jobhunt or some attacker is just crawling a list of Discord communities and attacking them all.
It's a shame but there are a _lot_ of attacks that abuse our trust in each other nowadays. A good reminder to, like mom and dad said, never trust strangers on the internet
by petterroea - And they're using LLMs, which are convincing enough from a basic conversational standpoint to prevent being immediately filtered as a bot as easily as in the past.
- Wow, after reading this article, I figured out I was hacked, but with a way more sophisticated attack.
A few weeks ago, I had an interview with a CTO of a totally legit company. It was weird because he had disabled the camera, and the person had a strong accent. But everything else sounded like a normal screening interview, and the person definitely knew what he was talking about. At the end of the interview, he explained to me that during the technical interview I would need to make some modifications to their project (it's an OSS product), so he asked me to clone the repo and check the setup.
Later, the HR person said the CTO got sick, so the interview would be postponed. But a few days later, the HR profile was deleted from LinkedIn. It was super weird, but it didn't trigger my suspicion until I saw this post on HackNews. I checked, and the repo I was cloning and running during the interview had a malware payload.
P.S. I think it was a targeted attack because in the past I maintained a very popular NPM package with 43+M weekly downloads. That's my only explanation for why someone would carry out such a sophisticated social-engineering attack against me.
P.P.S. It's great that I have 2FA everywhere, and I always publish NPM packages manually without using tokens. But I need to wipe my laptop and reinstall everything.
- whoaby pwillia7