North Korea's fake job interviews infected 30,000 devices North Korea's employment scams work both ways. As well as placing fraudulent IT workers inside Western companies, regime-backed cybercriminals have posed as recruiters to infect more than 30,000 devices and steal over $10 million, according to an international advisory. Law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies from Australia, …
who lack the ability and/or the inclination to create and use a virtual machine in risky circumstances.
Read my lips: VIR-TU-AL MA-CHINE.
It was a new thing-- back in the 1960s! (IBM Logical Partition, aka "LPAR".)
So, we have 7000 people who have shown they lack:
* good judgement
* computer knowledge
That's 7000 bad programmers who are not writing apps for American businesses. That's a good thing.
The down side is rhat they probably will become 'vibe coders'.
Personally, I read through a number of "proposals" as being nothing more than fishing expeditions for people who would be gullible enough to set them up with North American sub-contracts - hopefully without properly vetting their backgrounds. And even if you do "vet" someone, in the age of Artificial Ignorance, it is ever so much easier to plausibly fake a candidate's experience and credentials.
Rarely are people taught that a job interview goes both ways. Before I'd ever sit for an interview, I'd do a lot of research on the company. How else would I know how to lie on the application? Besides that, I'd really want to see if there were any reports on how the company is to work for, how they treat employees, etc. I've gone all the way through interviews and decided there was something about the company I didn't like and declined to continue the process. I can't recall more than one careerish job that I wasn't going to continue in indefinitely. The company was going to move to BF, Texas and I wasn't up for moving with them, but would work the job until then if they wound up hiring me. I didn't get hired, but shortly after I interviewed, the company lost a major investor and shut down, dodge a bullet there.
I'm an old pain in the ass these days and I'd never download some random software from a prospective employer for an employment test. I can see what happened as a decent scam. They dangled the carrot of a good job in front of people to get them to fall for installing unknown software that may ding some bells, but could be explained away as a lash up coding exercise so it might set off an alarm, but "it's fine, trust me".
Part of my computer hygiene program is to have different things on different computers. Media production is across the office running Photoshop right now. The CAD PC is not connected to the network. The accounting system lives on a headless Mac Mini strapped underneath a table and the CAM computer lives in the garage. Just to name a few. Hardware is dirt cheap these days. Many financial things I do in-person, not online for reasons one might imagine.
@ David 132:
The poster you responded to did not say something explicitly, and you missed it.
They were talking about a home and/or small-business setup, neither of which, typically, take much computing grunt-power, data storage, or TPS speed.
For those smaller purposes, lower-capacity and/or used equipment is plenty good.
If you want to play the latest MS-Windows-based, AAA games, you obviously are going to need more CPU speed/RAM capacity/video card computing power, etc., and for those, yes, you will be paying a pretty penny these days.
Businesses which either ~believe~, or truly need, to use application software which runs only on Windows 11 are going to have to pay the big money for "supported" hardware.
"Businesses which either ~believe~, or truly need, to use application software which runs only on Windows 11 are going to have to pay the big money for "supported" hardware."
And, what the people sitting behind those computers are doing is banging out memos, reports and spreadsheets. The OS is driving the hardware cost, not the applications.
"Really? So the RAM, GPU, SSD rip-off mess we're in is a figment of my imagination?"
My "media computer" is a 2010 Mac Pro that's been fully upgraded and runs an OS that isn't that old. Many other boxes are only as powerful as they need to be for the job they do. I'm not fitting out gaming rigs that need two circuits so they don't blow a breaker when switched on to run a flippin spreadsheet. Spitting out G-code is simple as a really simple thing.
If you need to do complex simulations, you should be charging enough to pay for a higher end computer. For me, much of the work I'm doing, the computer is waiting on me, not me on it. On the rare occasion when I am waiting for a giant export or something, I go get a cup of tea and visit the loo. That's usually the last step before compressing files and sending them off to a client.
