North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag
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Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag
#2A employee of an Amazon contractor...
Article is clear as mud, and its sourcing Bloomberg, on who has sketchy reputation on this type of stories.
Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag
#3A employee of an Amazon contractor... Article is clear as mud, and its sourcing Bloomberg, on who has sketchy reputation on this type of stories.
I'm not sure how keypress delay is measured but the rest sounds entirely consistent with the documented MO of North Korean hackers.
Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag
#4The Arizona woman the article refers to was sentenced to 102 months in prison for her role in this scheme: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/arizona-woman-sentenced-17m-i...
Pretty fascinating stuff.
Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag
#5I’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.
Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag
#6When 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.
Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag
#7When 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 your infrastructure can do untold damage to company finances, reputation, trade secrets, etc. Add to this the sensitive data Amazon processes on behalf of clients, and protecting against these threats becomes necessary for survival.
Also, this detection method doesn’t require full key logging. It just requires measuring the latency between some sample of keystrokes and receiving them on the server. It could be implemented in JavaScript on the login page. In fact it’s actually a clever technique that could be used for VPN detection by normal websites… in the case of Amazon it’s probably more complicated since the “client” may be behind a KVM/VNC server, but the same concept works.
Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag
#8Mind boggling. But well done Amazon.
So if I'm reading this right, all the NK perpetrators have to do "next time", is to have a local remote-desktop as a proxy?
Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag
#9When 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.
This is a dystopian consequence of an already dystopian fact that "you" might be a bot or someone completely different from what "you" purport to be.
In such a world, impersonation becomes too easy. It would be nigh impossible in the "all back to office" scenario, but people don't like that scenario either.
Re: North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag
#10This 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.