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North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag

tomshardware.com

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Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag

#11

Post by farbklang »

chatmasta wrote: post #7
the_biot wrote: post #6

When you work for Amazon, your computer is monitored to the point they check your keyboard typing speed. Dystopian doesn't even begin to describe it.

According to the article (and therefore Amazon, so take it with a grain of salt), they’ve “foiled more than 1,800 DPRK infiltration attempts since April 2024.” Company laptops are company property, and employees are warned prominently about the privacy implications of this. Endpoint security is the most critical protection against insider threats, which are the highest leverage attack vectors. One bad actor inside yo…

I fail to understand how you can measure keystroke latency coming from a KVM. Everything behind the KVM is invisible to you, assuming that it is spoofing a legitimate logitech dongle and emulating a legitimate screen edid.

The KVM uses buffering and queues the keystrokes. So the net time between them is the same as if I would type them locally.

What you could measure is the fingerprint of USB initialization and enumeration of keyboard, mouse etc when connecting and starting up.

Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag

#13

Post by vablings »

farbklang wrote: post #11
chatmasta wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article (and therefore Amazon, so take it with a grain of salt), they’ve “foiled more than 1,800 DPRK infiltration attempts since April 2024.” Company laptops are company property, and employees are warned prominently about the privacy implications of this. Endpoint security is the most critical protection against insider threats, which are the highest leverage attack vectors. One bad actor inside yo…

I fail to understand how you can measure keystroke latency coming from a KVM. Everything behind the KVM is invisible to you, assuming that it is spoofing a legitimate logitech dongle and emulating a legitimate screen edid. The KVM uses buffering and queues the keystrokes. So the net time between them is the same as if I would type them locally. What you could measure is the fingerprint of USB initialization and enume…

It's actually the buffering in this case that will get you dinged. The stated 110ms "lag" is probably the minimum time between keystrokes ever. If you have ever recorded data on the mean time between keystrokes you get a nice even distribution but for someone on a KVM it will look very skewed with most being under 110ms and zero below 110ms which is impossible for a normal human at a machine to replicate

Furthermore, there are a number of other side channel attacks here you could use to make things really inconvenient. Something super powerful would-be having a fido2 key such as a YubiKey and recording the mean time to human press keypress. Your average person who is present at the machine will touch the button in a number of seconds. A remote operator in NK will have to summon the homeowner which could take significantly longer.

Another technique you could use is look at the mouse movement data. You would also see the same truncated. distribution, I think a few people have put together a PoC for detecting cheaters in games based on mouse movements.

I do wonder also if the KVM devices they are using support HDCP. Showing media over HDCP on the screen that instructs the user to write an email or make a phone call instantly would be pretty cool.

Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag

#14

Post by vablings »

channeleaton wrote: post #5

I’ve come across two of these in the last few years of running interviews. All you have to do is ask about where they live and what they like about it. One, when asked about living in a dead-flat suburb of Houston, said he liked the mountains.

Easy workaround, AI & LLMS can generate you a random area you live and a simple profile from the perspective of people

What do you like about New Jersey?

"I like New Jersey for its proximity to NYC and Philadelphia, the huge variety of food (from diners to boardwalk pizza), and the great beaches and boardwalks like Asbury Park and Cape May."[1]

[1]: gpt5-mini on duck duck ai chat

Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag

#16

Post by wh_123 »

deafpolygon wrote: post #10

This is kind of dystopian if you think about it — they’re collecting all kinds of data from their workers. They probably can clock you in and out of your bathroom breaks automagically at some point soon.

True, something Microsoft wants to do with teams data.

Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag

#18

Post by burnt-resistor »

Amazon doesn't care that it hired malnourished slaves in sanctioned countries or that warehouse workers are subjected to extreme screening procedures and lack of accommodations to universal biology that lead to urination in bottles in the US and UK, they only care that it makes them lose profits from boycott blowback from bad PR.
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