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I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

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Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#231

Post by baobun »

ep103 wrote: post #161
kwar13 wrote: post #134

I had a very similar experience: https://kaveh.page/blog/job-interview-scam I would never agree to run someone's code on my own machine that didn't come from a channel I initiated. The odd time I've ran someone else's code, ALWAYS USE A VM!

How are you guys spinning up vms, specifically windows vms, so quickly? I used to use virtual box back in the day, but that was a pain and required a manual windows OS install. I'm a few years out of the loop, and would love a quick point in the right direction : )

A lot of the world has moved on from virtualbox to primarily qemu+kvm and to some extent xen. Usually with some higher-level tool on top. Some of these are packages you can run on your existing OS and some are distributions with hypervisor for people who use VMs as part of their primary workflows. If you just want quick-and-easy one-off Windows VM and move on, check out quickemu.

Libvirt and virt-manager https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Libvirt

Quickemu https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

Proxmox VE https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve

QubesOS https://qubes-os.org

Whonix https://whonix.org

XCP-ng https://xcp-ng.org/

You can also get some level of isolation by containers (lxc, docker, podman).

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#232

Post by MASNeo »

resize2996 wrote: post #209
citizenpaul wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Seasoned accounts are a positive heuristic I've found for the most part account age/usage is not considered at all in major online service providers. I've straight up been told by Google, Ebay and Amazon that they do not care about account age/legitimacy/seasoning/usage at all and it is not even considered in various cases I've had with these companies. They simply don't care about customers at all. They are only lo…

Eventually, some of these companies will realize that a well-managed customer service org is a profit center and they will get an enormous amount of business. Unfortunately, they'll all keep fucking over customers until they realize that accepting life in the crab bucket is a negative-sum game. I'm considering going back to school to write a "Google Fi 2016-2023: A Case Study in Enshittification" thesis but I'm not s…

Try philosophy, you would need good logic to get the necessary peer reviewed publications ;-)

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#233

Post by Wowfunhappy »

This article is so interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling it was written by AI. The writing style has that feel for me.

Maybe that shouldn’t bother me? Like, maybe the author would never have had time to write this otherwise, and I would never have learned about his experience.

But I can't help wishing he'd just written about it himself. Maybe that's unreasonable--I shouldn't expect people to do extra work for free. But if this happened to me, I would want to write about it myself...

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#234

Post by hinkley »

It's becoming clear to me that I need to have at least 2 user accounts on my machine that are set up to do coding.

One for anything that I own or maintain, and one for anything I'm experimenting with. I don't know if my brain can handle it but it's quickly becoming table stakes, at least in some programming languages.

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#235

Post by Lalabadie »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #233

This article is so interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling it was written by AI. The writing style has that feel for me. Maybe that shouldn’t bother me? Like, maybe the author would never have had time to write this otherwise, and I would never have learned about his experience. But I can't help wishing he'd just written about it himself. Maybe that's unreasonable--I shouldn't expect people to do extra work for fr…

My issue with the article's repeated use of a Title + List of Things structure isn't that it's LLM output, it's that it's LLM output directly, with no common sense editing done afterwards to restore some intelligent rhythm to the writing.

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#236

Post by redherring22 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #233

This article is so interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling it was written by AI. The writing style has that feel for me. Maybe that shouldn’t bother me? Like, maybe the author would never have had time to write this otherwise, and I would never have learned about his experience. But I can't help wishing he'd just written about it himself. Maybe that's unreasonable--I shouldn't expect people to do extra work for fr…

I stopped reading a few paragraphs in.

I get the point of the article. Be careful running other people's code on your machine.

After understanding that, there's no point to continue to read when a human barely even touched the article.

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#237

Post by singlow »

ep103 wrote: post #161
kwar13 wrote: post #134

I had a very similar experience: https://kaveh.page/blog/job-interview-scam I would never agree to run someone's code on my own machine that didn't come from a channel I initiated. The odd time I've ran someone else's code, ALWAYS USE A VM!

How are you guys spinning up vms, specifically windows vms, so quickly? I used to use virtual box back in the day, but that was a pain and required a manual windows OS install. I'm a few years out of the loop, and would love a quick point in the right direction : )

Also, you can spin up an ec2/azure/google vm pretty easy too. I do this frequently and it only costs a few bucks. Often more convenient to have it in the data center anyway.

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#238

Post by franga2000 »

> One simple AI prompt saved me from disaster. > Not fancy security tools. Not expensive antivirus software. Just asking my coding assistant to look for suspicious patterns before executing unknown code.

No, it wasn't an AI prompt that saved you, it was your vigilance. Don't give the AI props for something it didn't do - you were the one who knew that running other people's code is dangerous, you were the one that got over the cognitive biases to just run it. The AI was just a fancy grep.

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#239

Post by aydyn »

ddtaylor wrote: post #199

I had a light interview to get started with LLamaIndex from their Discord channel while I was waiting to connect with some of the real developers. The scammer attempted some nonsense in a similar way, but had no plausible reason why I would be accessing those packages or downloading those things. I was remote desktop streaming while messing with some of my own code. The repository is 100k+ lines of code and I was loo…

> I asked them the same questions I ask all scammers: How was this easier than just doing a normal job?

Ostensibly more profitable? Dont forget there are a lot of places where even what would be minimum wage in a first world country would be a big deal to an individual.

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#240

Post by bluGill »

quirkot wrote: post #215
culll_kuprey wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your residence history and your presences on the distributed Internet is the HARDES to fake. When I was 18 with little to no credit trying to do things. Financial institutions would often hit me with security questions like this. But, I was incredibly confused because many of the questions had no valid answer. Somehow these institutions got the idea that I was my stepmother or something and started asking me about…

Not to be rude, but... uh... did your step mom steal your identity and use it for stuff? Minors are huge targets for that sort of stuff because generally no one is checking a 10 year old's credit

10 year olds cannot legally do a lot of things. Other things they can do, but the law gets weird. Not that you are wrong - kids are a target, but there are a lot of protections.

Though if step mom shares your name (not unlikely if OP is a girl with a common name) it isn't a surprise that they will mix you up.

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