alt Hacker NewsNorth Korean fake job interview led to $6.3B Binance heist
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If she hadn't done it on her work laptop, her personal would have been pwned anyway. It's not clear to me how to protect oneself while also looking for work.
How love how in face of such sophistication and planning from the North Korean hackers, most of the comments are along the lines of “so dumb, I would never have fallen for it.”
Somehow I really doubt it.
If you want to learn more about the Lazarus group behind this heist, the BBC did an excellent podcast on another one of their operations:
https://www.bbc.com/audio/series/w27vqd03
(It's also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc)
My hunch is that this was partly an inside job. The "fake job interview" and "mistakenly downloaded trojaned homebrew" stories are to give plausible deniability. But they're not very plausible imho.
This is Binance/CZ's version of the story, but no one really knows the truth.
They have a massive incentive to invent a story to cover up the incident. I'm not saying it's a cover-up, but the motive is definitely there.
North Korea has denied responsibility, whereas they usually own up to their actions.
Disregarding that, it just doesn't make sense for their internal security to be so lax.
I've worked at big companies but with AUM lower than Binance, a lot of control and safeguards are in place to prevent one "rogue" employee from stealing everything.
It's pretty much impossible for a company like Binance to not have implemented such things. I do not buy it.
So, North Korea is involved in hits not unlike some Russians do. But at the same time it may provide a cover for other state actors. May be unlikely in this case (I think the pattern here is making it indeed most likely that North Korea is responsible, it just fits so much; for similar reasons, it was very clear that Marsalek worked for the FSB and stole a lot of money from europeans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Marsalek), but it should be kept in mind.
North Korea's open hostility to Western systems combined with its highly proficient human capital creates a bizarre situation where a formidable state-level actor is waging unrelenting warfare against private companies that operate in the Western-led global economic system, and due to the nature of the internet and North Korea's nuclear deterrent, there is no way to force that actor to stop.
After reading this story I understood that a lot of pieces had to come together to make the plan work. It was a huge long shot from the start and that makes me wonder how many times they must have tried this in the past? To make long shots like this work they must have tried relentlessly; they would've tried hundreds of thousands of developers before this
Letting lowbies have any credentials that can escalate to the vault is what what led to the heist.
Founder of Callstrike here .. we build real time deepfake & voice impersonation attack simulation tools for a living so this is literally what I deal with every day.
The biggest irony is that we get at least a couple of signups every month from South Korea, Russia, India, Nigeria just to try getting access to our platform for running these attacks ..
Here is the most recent copy paste from a Calendly invite ..
>Invitee Email: >[email protected]
>Invitee Time Zone: >Central European Time
>Questions:
>Please share anything that will help prepare for our meeting.
>We are an MSP from the UK that is look for a deepfake platform to run campaigns for our clients. We typically use open source software but there is a gap in our portfolio for deepfake testing that we can't fill with our usual open source philosophy.
The company website https://www.cairnsovereign.net/ was registered just 2 days ago .. they have no linkedin presence, fake CEO and fake CTO and fake everything ..
I still accepted the invite and joined and the person has a strong northern british accent .. he askd me to let his AI bot join the call to take notes ... i refused .. to which he swore and said that if a meeting bot is not allowed .. then i dont want to talk and abruptly hung up ...
PS: if anyone wants to see .. this is what a real time voice impersonation call and real time deepfake faceswap .. looks like ..
Zoom exploits could have done this without downloads. I don't interview on a computer with sensitive data, it's usually a throwaway. I sometimes get judged for doing the interview on a Chromebook or an old Mac and I hope that interviewers understand why I choose to do it this way.
insert “Oh no! Anyway…” Jeremy Clarkson meme
>> "...and is working with law enforcement, blockchain intel firms, and security researchers to trace and freeze the assets. The crypto exchange has also hired independent cybersecurity experts to conduct a cybersecurity review of the incident, and recommend additional protective measures."
>> trace and freeze the assets
It has gotten to the point where the advertised permanence of cryptocoin transactions is a serous national security threat, literally funneling $6+billion to a nation-state whose publicly avowed statements is to destroy the US to fund its nuclear weapons program.
The party is ending. The house lights are flashing. Crypto will either become controlled so illegitimate transactions will be roll-back-able (presumably with proper court or NatSec orders), or it will be banned.
I love these guys!
Anybody who thinks this can be prevented from happening again is deluding themselves. I'm looking forward to the MSTR heist writeup when it happens.
A lot of detail on what Engineer A, B and C did. But this would've been prevented if Engineer A didn't have "a container deployment permission token on his computer".
What the fuck? On a target as big as Binance? Every developer should be treated as a liability and never be able to deploy by themselves.
Yet another example of why you shouldn't use a work computer for personal purposes.
This is insane. The first engineer ran some curl bash, which gave the hackers access to his Slack, and then they set up an interview for him at a fake company and during that interview, they convinced an engineer to download and install some code they had written? This is just clown world.
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Move fast and break things. 4-eyes principle is for brick-and-mortar banks stuck in the prehistoric past of paper money. /s
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Guy probably skipped his "mandatory" KnowBe4 training... see HR actually does serve a purpose! /s
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It's strange companies haven't cracked something as basic as remote hiring checks yet.
There are tools available to stop AI screen recording tools, fake candidate tools yet many companies keep getting hit..
There is no evidence given that North Korea did this.
"TRM attributes this attack to TraderTraitor, North Korea’s premier hacking unit. We base this assessment on robust on and off-chain intelligence sources. The FBI named the same group as responsible for the USD 1.5 billion Bybit hack in February 2025. Several features of this attack match earlier North Korea-linked heists, including the Bybit hack and the KelpDAO hack in April 2026: small Tornado Cash withdrawals funding an operator wallet, staging that began well before the theft, and signatures obtained in advance then executed in one burst. The laundering observed so far, built on large swaps through market makers and lending protocols, differs from the bridge-heavy pattern that followed Bybit. TRM will share further findings as the investigation develops."
https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/north-korea-steals-us...
This is simply an assertion that an official enemy did something we don't like. It could just as well be a CIA money laundering scheme. This would make more sense, given the wider deployment of US cyber weapons and assets as well as the desire of North Korea not to provoke American aggression which previously murdered about 20% of their population.
It is widely known America has cyberweapons deployed around the globe. It is likely trivial for them to fake a trail of evidence from the DPRK.
I think we need to implement a new handshake protocol for job interviews.
Both candidate and recruiter have to call Kim Jong Un a big fat tosser (other swearwords are available) on a recorded video before the interview continues.
Am I the only one baffled by the fact that the engineer uses a work PC for a personal job interview assignment?