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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

#211
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem was using a machine that had access to half a billion dollars to also browse the web and do stuff like applying for jobs. If you're gonna have access to such amount of money, it's worth buying a dedicated machine and using it very, very cautiously.

When I first got into crypto, a few things were pretty much drilled into my head: - Not your keys, not your coins; always self-custody - Never use the same machine for trading and for work/surfing the web - Store only funds you want to regularly trade with on a hot wallet. Everything else on a cold wallet.

and this is part of why i think cryptocurrencies should have died before large number of people wasted their money on it. for the average user without the time/knowledge/patience to handle cryptos "properly", the choice is between losing money while handling this shit yourself or losing money while trusting someone else to do it right.

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opening the pdf wasn't "company work", so maybe everything should be done in a VM? (Not the same VM!)

He opened it on a company device I assume

That's possible, and addressed by your first sentence above. You wrote the second sentence to address a different possibility. In that case, a process with access to the whole device could read e.g. auth tokens contained in a VM.

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#213
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are my mantis blades?

The people in this review seem to think they're alright, but they look very silly to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB4DDM8VHVg YMMV. But hey, maybe you can ask them for their design.

> but they look very silly to me

And pretty impractical as well. They look really poorly designed in terms of maximizing leverage. It also looks like they lose a lot of energy in the flexing of the entire mechanism and their arm, compared to a blade held directly in the hand.

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#214

Two points to highlight from this article: 1. LinkedIn is an absolute godsend for bad guys, allowing easy targeting of everyone in the company with spear phishing emails and texts. I know many security professionals no longer use their real name, and don't list the real name of their company, because they know it's such a great hacking vector. Not sure what/whether LinkedIn can do anything about this. 2. I wish there…

> I know many security professionals no longer use their real name, and don't list the real name of their company, because they know it's such a great hacking vector. Not sure what/whether LinkedIn can do anything about this.

on the other hand I bet you could collect some interesting things by creating a few fake people as linkedin honeypots at FAANGs, and I would be very surprised in their infosec/netsec teams aren't already doing this.

or getting real people who opt-in to have their linkedin profile receive incoming scams, virus, trojans, phish links and pipeline them into the infosec/netsec team.

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#215

What's the best practice, security-wise, for viewing PDFs?

I have a script that watches my download folder and runs them through ghost script which is designed to reduce the file size of PDFs but it also strips out any linked media or embedded code from my testing. It does a bunch of other stuff too but the pdf auto-converter was pretty simple.

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of the article was that only 1 person was compromised and that the exploit installed on their computer was then used to access the validator nodes themselves. FWIW, I have no idea what a validator node is but I'm assuming that by compromising one employee's workstation they somehow got access to multiple other machines (which if true is itself a bit of a f* up).

> I'm assuming that by compromising one employee's workstation they somehow got access to multiple other machines (which if true is itself a bit of a f* up) Q: If you assume the bad guys have already compromised your workstation, how sure are you that they won't be able to compromise other machines you connect to?

because the workstation was compromised by opening a corrupted pdf, but that vector wouldn't compromise the other machines unless users on them could be induced to open the same pdf.

not to say it can't be done, but it was unexplained

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#217
"multiple rounds of fake job interviews" ... "The con culminated in one senior engineer clicking a PDF supposedly containing the official offer"

Wow! These folks were really on the ball if it took that much social engineering just to get an employee to open a PDF.

Re: A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

#218

Can someone explain to me how a pdf can execute code?

PostScript the "graphics language" that PDF was built around is a Turing Complete language.

Yes, but PDF doesn't embed the PostScript language (which is basically Forth). Acrobat Reader's Turing completeness comes from weird machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_machine

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