points by armcat 4 days ago | 0 comments
I actually got contacted by North Koreans posing as Japanese VC looking to partner in the Nordics. I have an agent that scans my emails and does the inverse filtering, suggests when I should take a look. This is because I get insane amount of cold inbound. But it also flags suspicious emails and uses network tools to find out info about the sender. It flagged that one as a NK account (I later confirmed it was already flagged on the watch list in various reddit channels). Everyone should be arming themselves with email filtering agents now. What I’m worried about is grandmas and grandpas and general ppl that are behind the tech curve.
[–] Animats 3 days ago
[–] Duwensatzaj 3 days ago
Can you provide more information on your email filtering agent?
[–] armcat 3 days ago
I just have Codex hooked up to the email client plugin and an hourly scheduled task. Then I have a prompt for selecting the ones I should read and flagging the suspicious ones. The prompt is combined with memory since Codex now understands what is important to me. For suspicious research I have my own skills with a bunch of "usual" tools, dig, whois, openssl client, curl, virustotal, and web research across reddit and a few other sites.
[–] randomNumber7 3 days ago
How would the North Koreans profit from hacking grandma's PC?
[–] armcat 3 days ago
It’s not the pc. It will be over the phone. They will call, use TTS with voice cloning to impersonate someone in their family, 5 seconds is all you need. Do a bank transfer to this address. Or click on this link we send you now over sms. You do a million of those.
[–] sevmardi 3 days ago
Compromise the pc and use it a zombie for other ops. That's one example.
I used to go to parties at Hacker Dojo in the early days of AI. Google wasn't into AI yet and Hacker Dojo had classes, often attended by Google people. (I learned way too much about support vector machines, in a class taught by a guy from BlackRock.) There were a lot of very good looking Chinese women at the parties who were very interested in what people were working on. They were very bright, understood the subject, and had business cards from small companies no one had heard of. Then one day they all disappeared and were not seen again. I regret not asking one how she liked working for the Third Department.