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I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

blog.daviddodda.com

361–370 of 534 posts

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

#361

A friend of mine had the same attack but it was on the video interview, it was a blockchain job, they were demoing the project, they asked my friend to connect his wallet to their project, and ask him to sign, and voilá, all his funds were drained. The crypto world is a jungle.

How is that jungle if someone aks you to give them your wallet and you just give it away? What was he thinking?

Probably "I really want/need this well-paid job" or something.

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

#362
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad idea. Competent candidates might also disqualify you as employer right there. Plus you'll be part of normalizing hazardous behavior.

strong disagree. it's very similar to anti-phishing training/tests. also, being tagged as a company that cares that its potential new hires are not lazy programmers that just copy&paste because someone told them too would more than likely be taken as a positive not a negative.

But where does it stop ?

Will there be trap clauses in the NDA and contract to see if they carefully read every line ? Will they be left with no onboarding on day one to see how far they can go by themselves ? etc.

You're starting the relationship on the base of distrust, and they don't know you, they have no idea how far you're willing to go, and assuming the worst would be the safest option.

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, why do you have to say that? A CV is expected to be super polished and not necessarily consistent with the rest of your writing, right?

If I were asked a direct question, especially in a job interview, I would be truthful. That answer stops any sniping about using AI and lets me focus on my skills.

Ah, I misunderstood the parent comment as having that disclaimer on the CV itself.

I agree that if asked directly, it makes sense to talk about candidly. Hopefully an employer would be happy about someone who understands their weak spots and knows how to correctly use the tools as an aid.

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

#365
I recently had a company try to get me to install an app to do an "Async Interview" I was not interested in an "Async Interview" let alone their app.

I didn't even consider the app being bad, My concern for an attack vector was using the relatively controlled footage of me to generate some sort of AI version of me and use that to steal my identity.

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s incredibly annoying to read. So many super short sentences with the “not just X. Also Y” format. Little hooks like “The attack vector?” “Not fancy security tools. Not expensive antivirus software. Just asking my coding assistant…” I actually feel like AI articles are becoming easier to spot. Maybe we’re all just collectively noticing the patterns.

I'm regularly asked by coworkers why I don't run my writing through AI tools to clean it up and instead spend a time iterating over it, re-reading, perhaps with a basic spell checker and maybe grammar check. That's because, from what I've seen to date, it'd take away my voice. And my voice -- the style in which I write -- is my value. It's the same as with art... Yes, AI tools can produce passable art, but it feels s…

I consider myself to be an above average writer and a great editor. I will just throw my random thoughts about something that happened at work, ask ChatGPT to keep digging deeper in my question, I will give it my opinion of what I should do. Ask it to give me the “devil’s advocate” and the “steel man opinion” and then ask it to write a blog post [1].

I then edit it for tone, get rid of some of the obvious AI tells. Make some edits for voice, etc.

Then I throw it into another season of ChatGPT and ask it does it sound “AI written”. It will usually call out some things and give me “advice”. I take the edits that sound like me.

Then I put the text through Grok, Gemini and ask it the same thing. I make more edits and keep going around until I am happy with it. By the time I’m done, it sounds like I something I would write.

You can make AI generated prose have a “voice” with careful prompting and I give it some of my writing.

Why don’t I just write it myself if I’m going through all that? It helps me get over writers block and helps me clarify my thoughts. My editing skills are better than my writing skills.

As I do it more and give it more writing samples, it is a faster process to go from bland AI to my “voice”

[1] my blog is really not for marketing. I don’t link to it anywhere and I don’t even have my name attached to it. It’s more like a public journal.

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

#367
post #161
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 : )

If you're on a Mac, you probably want OrbStack nowadays. It's fabulous!

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

#368
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, ask it something right away and it'll use its own voice. Give it lots of data from your own writing through examples and extrapolations on your speech patterns and it will impersonate your voice more. It's like how it can impersonate Trump, it has lots of examples to pull from, you? it doesn't know you. LLMs needs large amount of input to give it a really good output.

Then why even do it? I already have a language model trained on the corpus of everything I've ever wrote. It sits between my two ears.

It does it faster…

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

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm regularly asked by coworkers why I don't run my writing through AI tools to clean it up and instead spend a time iterating over it, re-reading, perhaps with a basic spell checker and maybe grammar check. That's because, from what I've seen to date, it'd take away my voice. And my voice -- the style in which I write -- is my value. It's the same as with art... Yes, AI tools can produce passable art, but it feels s…

I manage an employee from another country and speaks English as a second language. The way they learned English gives them a distinct speaking style that I personally find convincing, precise and engaging. I started noticing their writing losing that voice, so I asked if they were using an LLM and they were. It was a tough conversation because as a native English speaker I have it easy, so I tried to frame my side of…

As a non-native English speaker living in AU, I can offer my opinion in case it's helpful.

Of course I can't speak to the person you mentioned but if you said what you did with respect and courtesy then they probably would've appreciated it. I know I would have. To me, there's no problem speaking about and approaching these issues and even laughing about cultural issues, as long as it's done with respect.

I once had a manager who told me that a certain client finds the way I speak scary. When I asked why, it turns out that they're not expecting the directness in my speech manner. Which is strange to me since we were discussing implementation and requirements and directness and precision are critical and when they're not... well that's how projects fail, in my opinion. On the other hand, there were times when speaking to sales people left me dizzy from all the spin. Several sentences later and I still had no idea if they actually answered the question. I guess that client was expecting more of the latter. Extra strange since that would've made them spend more money than they have to.

Now running my own business, I have clients that thank me for my directness. Those are the ones that have had it with sales people that think doing sales is by agreeing to everything the client says and promising delivery of it all and then just walking away leaving the client with a bigger problem than the one they started with.

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

#370

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…

>but I can’t shake the feeling it was written by AI.

After I read this article, I thought this whole incident is fabricated and created as a way to go viral on tech sites. One immediate red flag was: why would someone go to these lengths to hack a freelancer who's clearly not rich and doesn't have millions in his cryptowallet. And how did they know he used Windows? Many devs don't.

Ah, you might say, maybe he is just one of the 100 victims. Maybe but we'd hear from them by now. There's no one else on X claiming to have been contacted by them.

Anyway, I'm highly skeptical of this whole incident. I could be wrong though :)

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