I was 30 seconds away from running malware, Here's how a sophisticated scam operation almost got me, and why every developer needs to read this.

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A developer shares a close call with a sophisticated phishing attack disguised as a legitimate job interview. The scam involved a fake LinkedIn profile from a real company, a coding challenge containing obfuscated malware designed to steal crypto wallets and credentials, and professional social engineering tactics. The attack was discovered by using an AI assistant to scan the codebase for suspicious patterns before execution. The malware was embedded in server-side code with full Node.js privileges and connected to a remote payload that disappeared within 24 hours.

How I Almost Got Hacked By A 'Job Interview'

Wow, that is an impressive phish I must say. Thanks for the heads up. I guess adopting a trust nothing, verify everything approach is the only way to be safe.
Well done for dodging that, and thank you for sharing.

That was close call. Time to isolate the coding environment from the personal one.

Nice one uncovering this and writing about it. This was really slick and I must say, I very well would have been tricked by this.

a trait i’ve seen many great engineers have is a near-obsession about small details. in this case, the fact that the server’s endpoint was encoded naturally reeks of a musky code smell. my initial thought seeing that is that either a newbie or bad actor wrote that logic, but before you even make that determination, you’d have to effectively find that needle in the haystack. wow 😳 lol i love how the function is commented with “Get cookie” as a blatant lie 💀