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.
It appears the Binance hack was a social engineering stunt. Can’t say I’m surprised. Often the biggest weaknesses in any system is the people running it.
I like how companies always emphasize how advanced and sophisticated the attack was, and it just boils down to somebody downloading something
Still, who the heck takes a job interview call on their office laptop??
Wtf, Everyone
A Finance company which has its production systems in the same network as worker computers which aren’t locked-down tight is basically amateur hour every hour of the day every day of the month every month of the year.
You can never assume that workers won’t do stupid shit like downloading random software into their work computers even when its a fuckingly obvious bad idea for most people to do such stupid shit - it only takes one idiot, naive fool or even momentary distraction of somebody who should’ve known better to end up with your network hacked, so you always treat such devices as possibly contaminated.
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 🙃