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A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

roman.pt

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Re: A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

#91

Post by citizenpaul »

wxw wrote: post #16

> a recruiter at a small crypto startup [...] she described a broken proof-of-concept they needed a lead engineer for, and then sent me a public GitHub repo to review. Specifically, she asked me to “check out the deprecated Node modules issue.” > ...buried between walls of commented-out tests, the payload runs anything the server sends back to your machine. > npm runs prepare automatically after npm install, so just…

I'm not. I call it identitythiefresourcecenter.com or its shorter name freecriminalresource.com

I hate how normalized it became for "HR" to require you having a LI page for a job. I don't think its as bad now but for a while it was essentially not possible to get a job without putting all your personal info on linkedin.

Re: A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

#92

Post by sublinear »

underlipton wrote: post #86
pants2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile. We've had fake recruiters that claim to work for us running basically the same scam. These are great fake profiles: LinkedIn Premium, tons of relevant posts, etc... but they don't work for us, and we get angry messages from people saying our recruiter tr…

>I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn I'd like people to understand that this is a form of corruption. We've normalized many like it. LI knows that the only way to force them to fix the issue is to go through a drawn-out legal process, save a spate of bad press (RIP 60 Minutes), so of course they won't.

[flagged]

Re: A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

#94

Post by LooseMarmoset »

Xirdus wrote: post #44
bityard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it bluntly and perhaps a bit cynically, on the tree of bad things that people do to other people, this is pretty high-hanging fruit. Right up there next to scam phone calls that prey on the elderly while claiming to be from Microsoft support. It's basically impossible to catch suspects because they are either smart enough to cover their tracks very well, or (more often) live in countries whose governments don'…

Hard disagree on the scam phone calls. It would be trivial to eradicate them almost completely if the phone operators did the bare minimum to fight against it. At any point in time, any given US phone number is handled by exactly one phone carrier. There is nothing stopping that carrier from requiring name and address to issue that phone number. They already do for 99.99% of their legitimate customers. It would be ve…

You are not wrong. They don't do this because they make money from the scammers.

I have posted about this before. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191971

Re: A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

#96

Post by LooseMarmoset »

Were I still on Linkedin, I could totally have been caught by this. Thank you for this post, and the technical breakdown.

The company that I currently work for is currently paying for a curation product to scan NPM for vulnerabilities, and to prevent access to typo-squatting packages and new, unverified packages. I suspect that my employer may get to the point of banning NPM entirely, though.

Re: A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

#97

Post by throwaway7783 »

pants2 wrote: post #56
wxw wrote: post #16

> a recruiter at a small crypto startup [...] she described a broken proof-of-concept they needed a lead engineer for, and then sent me a public GitHub repo to review. Specifically, she asked me to “check out the deprecated Node modules issue.” > ...buried between walls of commented-out tests, the payload runs anything the server sends back to your machine. > npm runs prepare automatically after npm install, so just…

LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile. We've had fake recruiters that claim to work for us running basically the same scam. These are great fake profiles: LinkedIn Premium, tons of relevant posts, etc... but they don't work for us, and we get angry messages from people saying our recruiter tr…

LinkedIn doesn't have any redressal mechanisms for anything. Someone I knew went through a lot of abuse by a LI user and kept making new accounts to harass. LinkedIn's response - "We did not find anything that violates our ToC". No wonder it has become a cesspool of spam, fraud and abusers.

Re: A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

#98

Post by sheept »

afpx wrote: post #51
gleenn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friends don't let friends use NPM. At this point it is so wildly crazy watching people get owned, I don't understand how anyone uses it when they could use e.g. PNMPM and block one if the most obvious and frequently exploited holes. These tools with arbitrary code execution when trying to download some code have got to stop. Edit: typos

Github / Microsoft could easily fix this, couldn't they? Leaving NPM up in its current state seems criminal, especially since LLMs generate NPM commands so frequently.

Is it possible to fix it in a backwards compatible way? Removing lifecycle scripts is at least a semver major change, and would complicate existing projects relying on packages with lifecycle scripts from upgrading.

Re: A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

#100

Post by 0x20cowboy »

gleenn wrote: post #32
wxw wrote: post #16

> a recruiter at a small crypto startup [...] she described a broken proof-of-concept they needed a lead engineer for, and then sent me a public GitHub repo to review. Specifically, she asked me to “check out the deprecated Node modules issue.” > ...buried between walls of commented-out tests, the payload runs anything the server sends back to your machine. > npm runs prepare automatically after npm install, so just…

Friends don't let friends use NPM. At this point it is so wildly crazy watching people get owned, I don't understand how anyone uses it when they could use e.g. PNMPM and block one if the most obvious and frequently exploited holes. These tools with arbitrary code execution when trying to download some code have got to stop. Edit: typos

I agree, but I’d extend that to any language using a package manager at this point. “A little copying is better than a little dependency” even more correct now.

All my current projects have all the code needed in the repo (unless impossible, and aside from a compiler which I guess could also be compromised)

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