How did Amazon know the lag?
Probably a remote kvm system with QOS monitoring. Many secure systems won’t let you connect directly to sensitive resources from your personal workstation.
But the infiltrator hacked the remote worker’s computer.
The actual worker may have been require to use…
https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/desktop-as-a-service/
But the lag from the infiltrator to that is what was detected. There was presumably no Amazon software installed on the infiltrator’s computer so how can the lag be measured?
Keyboard input over kvm is pretty awful. It’s possible the kvm software was enforcing a delay between keystrokes to make sure they are delivered in order. Seeing keys consistently pressed with 500ms separation would be odd.
Perhaps something like time between key pressed and key released being abnormally high? Or erratic mouse movement?
I know whenever a PC I’m using is being remotely controlled, the mouse jerks around instead of moving smoothly around the screen. I’d imagine that gets even worse with ping/more layers of remote connections.
Yes but you need access to the culprit’s computer for the lag measurement.
Amazon security experts took a closer look at the flagged ‘U.S. remote worker’ and determined that their remote laptop was being remotely controlled – causing the extra keystroke input lag.
With access to the final remote desktop, and access to the workers laptop you know the delay from these two so if there is more delay, then you can infer it’s coming from somewhere else? I’m sure there are more paths too but access to the North Koreans hardware doesn’t seem required
Also worth pointing out that this was a flagged employee (probably from something like data access logs) so they would be under more scrutiny and surveillance than the average employee
No. I’m talking about measuring the time in-between inputs being received over the remote connection. Purely observation from the receiver side of the connection.
Network overhead + dropped and re-sent packets, introducing unusual lag in between commands/keystrokes.
A key being pressed and key being released are two separate events that get transmitted separately and usually happen pretty close together. That gap getting larger, due to the long-distance connection introducing lag, could be what they were looking at.
I’m kind of surprised the latency was that low. Unless the NK “employee” was spoofing being in SK or something.
How was he hired 🤯 ? It’s a skill
There was a scam going where they would offer for someone to apply for a role and use that good candidates clean information to get it v they would do the work and split the pay with the person who’s info they used.
In exchange that person would get “job experience”, the perks of WFH, and the ability to hold down more than one of these figurehead jobs simultaneously.
Why didn’t my guidance counselor tell me this was an option it sounds perfect for me!
Probably because it gets you in trouble with the feds.
Let’s see if Amazon gets trump to yell at Un.
