I would manage that lag. Partly ground partly open air landline to a farm, powerline over a wire that makes the receiver give up all few days.
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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I'm kind of surprised the latency was that low. Unless the NK "employee" was spoofing being in SK or something.
The article says he was remotely controlling a company laptop located in Arizona. A woman located in AZ was facilitating the NK workers, but she was recently charged with the fraud.
Hong Kong to Los Angeles is around 70ms latency (140ms round trip) so I'm not too surprised.
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.
Probably worked for next to no pay.
To me that means Amazon can and will monitor every keystroke of every employee.
This is the real story.
I mean, more like does and has been, but I guess that's just semantics. Evil gon be evil.
Worked at Google and can confirm if you typed your password into a non org website you were flagged and asked to reset your PW. The problem is some of the training websites Google used and were Google branded were apparently non org websites. But it shows they are looking for "certain key strokes"
My employer does the same over a proxy. Luckily it can't breach HTTPS, but it was annoying to set all my APs and router and switches and other network nodes to HTTPS just because the damn thing would block the site the moment I sent my password in cleartext to a local device...
set all my APs and router and switches and other network nodes to HTTPS
What does that mean? HTTPS is a client-server thing, your APS and switches don't really have anything to do with that.
Setting their management interfaces to be accessed via https because the VPN blocks (after snooping on) http only access would be my guess
You’re sure they aren’t decrypting your traffic? Check the root cert of any site and see if it’s their own root.
Larger companies that monitor for corporate passwords being entered on third-party sites usually use a browser extension that's force-installed using Chrome Enterprise. That's especially the case if they mandate the usage of Chrome.
Why do you say usually? It’s not what I do. I MitM every machine.
This is definitely a thing.
Only if the site they’re visiting isn’t using HSTS, but it’s possible
I don't think this is correct. HSTS only prevents downgrading.
HSTS says it must be encrypted but a proxy will create two connections and look at it clear in the middle. On the other hand cert pinning says it must be a specific cert that breaks the site if decryption is used. Apple is big on doing that for a lot of their site and apps.
Annoying, but ideally it would have been the initial configuration
It wasn't the lag from the employee's computer to Amazon which was being monitored.
It was the lag from the hacker to the employee. Amazon could not have monitored the hacker's computer.
These north koreans are really hard working people..
How did Amazon know the lag?
This is a company that's been reported to use the dwell time of you mouse over a product as a potential indicator of interest. Something like a Citrix remote desktop is extremely chatty trying to keep the origin and server in sync with every move of a mouse or keystroke. If the ACKs from the origin confirming the receipt of screen change data took an abnormally long time it could show in system performance metrics pretty easily.
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.
Let’s see if Amazon gets trump to yell at Un.
And now you know why you should encrypt your data on any cloud provider.
To save it from North Koreans?
.. and anyone else who should not have access to your data.
Ah that's true