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A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

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Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#41

I'm still not entirely convinced this wasn't an inside job (or entirely made up) and they just put a nice pot of money away somewhere. Wouldn't be without precedent in the wonderful world of crypto...

You don't just take some dude's word for it when dealing with a $600+ million dollar heist. There were multiple third party investigators involved in the aftermath.

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily embed arbitrary javascript into any PDF, and you can obfuscate it pretty well enough to get past most endpoint security tools on the market.

That JS would be sandboxed similar to in browsers, so you'd still need an exploit to break out of that.

Not too tough, if you're a state backed group. Just buy one.

The going price for Adobe PDF RCE zero-days is $80,000

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#43
During beginning of pandemic I got a job via a fully remote process. I felt it was sketchy in some respects and I began to increasingly fearful that it was some kind of phishing scheme. Luckily turned out to be legit. Job applications are such an open door for this kind of thing. They collect so much info from candidates, easily enough to commit identity theft. Also god forbid the company or recruiters get hacked and the data leaks anyway

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#44

How is Proof of Authority, mentioned in the article, any different than normal social trust and reputational risk associated with that? This seems like a cute way of wrapping up the status quo in crypto lingo.

All it means is that the system organizers decided to make a certain set of keys able to vote on transaction validity. Similar for example to how browser vendors decide to make a certain set of keys valid for issuing certs.

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#47

They say that a worker downloading (and presumably viewing) a PDF (fake job offer) allowed spyware in. Which PDF viewer was exploited?

You can easily embed arbitrary javascript into any PDF, and you can obfuscate it pretty well enough to get past most endpoint security tools on the market.

Is there a good no-nonsense way to clean PDFs of possible threats? Hunting around I see mentions of converting PDF->Postscript->PDF to remove junk, but I also see mentions that Postscript is its own security mess.

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#48

Curious if anyone has been able to find technical details of how this attack works/worked. I'm under the impression most PDF viewers would prevent this sort of attack (e.g. opening a PDF in your browser should sandbox it to the browsing context), but really keen to know what PDF viewer / OS was used by the dev.

Here's a demonstration of some example attacks using pdf: executing arbitrary js, and connecting to a samba server: https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/malicious-pdfs-revealing-te... I'm not sure about this attack specifically, though, and in Ronin's post mortem they aren't really talking about that: https://roninblockchain.substack.com/p/back-to-building-roni... . To some extent, the PDF viewer/OS doesn't matter. A ded…

The right move here would have been to have separate work/personal computers so that this PDF never landed on a system with access to the Ronin network.

I know I'm pushing a boulder uphill with that one but it really is the way to go, better for both the individual and the company.

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#49

Curious if anyone has been able to find technical details of how this attack works/worked. I'm under the impression most PDF viewers would prevent this sort of attack (e.g. opening a PDF in your browser should sandbox it to the browsing context), but really keen to know what PDF viewer / OS was used by the dev.

Here's a demonstration of some example attacks using pdf: executing arbitrary js, and connecting to a samba server: https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/malicious-pdfs-revealing-te... I'm not sure about this attack specifically, though, and in Ronin's post mortem they aren't really talking about that: https://roninblockchain.substack.com/p/back-to-building-roni... . To some extent, the PDF viewer/OS doesn't matter. A ded…

> To some extent, the PDF viewer/OS doesn't matter. A dedicated and well resourced attacker like the Lazarus Group will find holes in all of them.

I dispute this: the web browser is one of the most defended pieces of software of all time, especially relative to its complexity. I would find it much safer to open a potentially malicious PDF in my browser's JS-based reader than using a desktop reader.

> The "right" move here would have been for the employee not to download the compromised pdf, and short of that, for the IT Security team at Ronin to quickly detect the weird traffic that resulted and isolate the validators to prevent a compromise of their critical assets.

It also probably would have been helpful if one employee didn't have access to almost half of the validators, especially on a system they're accessing email with.

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