Poor headline.
It began in June when an employee on Binance’s wallet developer team thought they’d indulge in some vibe coding by installing a popular AI coding tool. But they ended up downloading a tampered installation of Homebrew, a tool that’s popular with software engineers, after clicking a malicious ad.
There’s lots of packages on Homebrew and it’s a popular package manager, even outside of MacOS. He could have decided to grab anything from Homebrew and get hit.
The real one to blame here is Google for doing zero vetting on the crap they put at the top of the search results. Malicious ads for popular software happen constantly and so far they haven’t moved an inch to fix it.
If you touch computers enough to install homebrew you shouldve touched computers enough to find the real download link, or at least install ublock.
But who downloads homebrew from the web and not CLI?
Thats something I would absolutely do years ago before I got more familiar with cli and not as afraid of a terminal shell
I’ve noticed Futurism has a ton of clickbait headlines.
I should really switch to Piefed so I can block it as a source…
If you are developing software with financial impact, and every developer downloads their dependencies from the internet without further checks, you already have set up yourself for desaster.
If you would ask a LLM for how to guard yourself against malicious dependencies, this would be one of the first things they’d point out.
Also crazy how they are just allowed to “indulge” themselves with vibecoding on a machine that can access live production servers.
Yeah, just doing shit without worrying about things like security is a core part of vibe coding. Vibecoding as a concept put into practice is definitely to blame.
Bold of you to blame google, a malware company, for advertising malware.
futurism .com links often seem like clickbait for people who are skeptical of the broligarchy.
- It Turns Out Binance’s $6 Billion Hack Happened Because Its Employees Were Vibe Coding
- Anthropic’s IPO Is Cratering
- Kids Hooked on AI Chatbots Are Showing Dramatically Worse Mental Health: They’re turning to AI chatbots for help, but their machine confidantes are doing more harm than good.
- Former Meta Exec Shreds the Company’s Muse AI Agent as “Insane” Privacy Risk
I’m all for covering that side of the story - we need a lot more resistance against the oligarchy. But clickbait is sleazy no matter what story it’s pretending it can tell.
Sleazy propaganda is sleazy propaganda even if it’s in my favor.
Yeah, Futurism’s presentation is always overly dramatic and clickbaity. I end up learning more by clicking on the embedded links in the articles than the articles themselves.
And that’s why it’s always best to post the original source, not a repost with a warped headline.
TBH, if this gets worse, I’d like for /c/technology to enforce that as a rule.
The person to blame is the idiot clicking on ads for software downloads
Yeah but a secure system should have stopped them. And even if that first safety net failed another one should have stopped the hackers from accessing the client’s crypto accounts. Why does a software dev’s computer need access to the live accounts.
Also why can they just access any website? Shit should’ve been locked down. They should’ve only be able to access whitelisted websites.
If we blamed every low level individual idiot who falls for malware, we’d be here all day and the malware would still be there. How about we blame the people pushing malware to millions of idiots? Also the companies who can’t even employ the most basic cybersecurity best practices to protect their own assets. It’s not like they were a small startup that can’t afford to.
Blame should be shared. It’s not a full sum game. It’s a failure of every part.
I’ll still blame the corporation gaining god knows how much money with this over the individual person, even if I also think a Developer should have known better.
Or blame the company for hiring such an incompetent dev and then giving them access to systems with so much money on the line.
Google purposely malware advertise. They know these sites are malware.
The headline makes it sound like vibecoding was the main part in this, but in the text they describe an elaborate social engineering scheme that compromised the laptop.
"The engineer was asked to complete and download an “assignment” that contained malicious code that instantly executed once the employee began installing it. Among the things it changed was replacing a real development tool with a malicious version that could communicate with the hackers and execute commands.
That all took place in September. Starting in October, the hacker used the compromised employee machine to leverage an internal AI tool and use it as a “springboard” to seize control of the computer and the computer of a third wallet developer. "
They want to blame AI but realistically it comes down to human error. Cyber security is more about sociology than it is about technology.
An argument could be made that someone untrained (many vibe coders) shouldn’t be in positions that would fall for this. A stretch, but still valid.
Just wait until a generation is raised on AI and never has to think hard or critically in their life. They will be so easily exploitable.
Ahh, but the AI will be so smart they will thwart the hackers (and the hackers will have been leaning on AI for so long they won’t be able to break through)
/s (kinda? Lol)
The actual argument here is just comon sense really- don’t do private stuff on a work machine!
They didnt?
True and I wonder if all the LLM‘s will take this vector over? I mean they study all texts, behaviors, and human interactions.
They do not study.
It can, but it would be the underlying technology not any of the out of the box chat llm versions. Realistically, it would be easier to monitor for device tampering, like downloading an unapproved software, than correlating the human behavior.
Thank you for that clarification.
It makes sense that the kind of people who vibecode would fall for this :P
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How is it that wallet developers had access to customers crypto? This seems like bad security and a breach of trust.
These big brokerages offer wallet services. And need wallets of their own to store what’s being held/traded on their site. Someone has to maintain that stuff.
you know. I’ve worked at large corporations that were required to be HIPAA and PCI compliant. the big database with millions of records of sensitive information was limited access. who had access to it?
- the application
- the DBAs who managed it
- me, who managed the application and was backup for the DBAs
not even the execs had access to it.
my point is, it sounds like they aren’t following compliance requirements and should probably face a class action suit at the least.
Getting socially engineered with AI slop and then downloading some random shit on your work machine is just humongously stupid. I wouldn’t want to be in the skin of that engineer right now
Dude should never be allowed to touch a computer again. How do these people get hired? He Googled “homebrew,” clicked a fucking ad, landed at the page in the screenshot, then ran that insanely obviously suspicious terminal command to “install” it. Are you joking.
I agree with you, but unfortunately “just run this command” is how the brew page works, so mac users are trained to just do that, and I can believe they did it without looking (although that command would have me asking questions as well) -
What the fuck? I did that when i was like 13. If someone wrote this as a story, no one would believe it, because its too stupid, but fucking hell, reality is dumber than fiction.
Holy crap! That’s wild.
Awesome story actually if you have a minute to read through. Sounds like it would be very technical but the details are easy to follow
true of most ‘hacking’. its mostly a grift.
Yep, and most “security vulnerabilities” are just humans, especially the ones who are not motivated (compensated) enough to give a fuck.
or terrible security policy.
Holy shit y’all are desperate. Your characterization is basically a straight up lie at this point. Anti ai propaganda is rotting your brains.
June when an employee on Binance’s wallet developer team thought they’d indulge in some vibe coding by installing a popular AI coding tool. But they ended up downloading a tampered installation of Homebrew,
Its a shame liable laws are so weak in the US.
Libel
🤷
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It was to expect.
Someone was bound to introduce some “AI slop” & “Vibe coding” bashing into this case — true or not.
What took them so long?
… did you even read the article? Its not really bashing if it’s true
Its not really bashing if it’s true
So I’ve never had a true chance to bash trump? 😰
Imagine being this stupid. Jesus dude. Reading is fundamental.
Yeeeeeeees! All those “programmers”. Fuckwits that know nothing, just follow idiotic prediction algorithms.
Clearly see the title and get filled with rage, huh?
Read the fucking article.
It was a very sophisticated social engineering hack and nothing to do with “vibe coding”.
It has everything to do with blindly following algorithms though. Guy clicked on a malicious ad after searching for something and trusted it blindly. So the poster is actually mostly right.
Idk how sophisticated it is if it counts on an engineer being dumb enough to click a Google ad. Lucky, maybe.
Being head-hunted through linkedin, multiple interviews and even having the CEO on whatsapp, thinking you might have something better to do than work for a shitty crypto company somehow makes this person… dumb? Opening the assessment on a work machine, now THATS dumb.
Yes, not doing due diligence on a recruiter and company is dumb.
Downloading an unapproved program on your work station is dumb.
Not putting it in a sandbox is dumb.
This dude was dumb, at least at this specific moment in time.
🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
The problem with your position is that this guy was, in fact, a moron.
I love how all of you think you’re invincible against a dedicated hack and phishing against your companies. Like peak fly to close to the sun bullshit. The arrogance is just comedic gold.
This was a highly organized scheme using targeted ads.
Which is why I’m stuck having to watch training videos on exactly this shit every other month. And my company sends out fake phishing emails regularly to test for people doing this.
And our workstations don’t allow us to install shit
🤷 security is hard
