TFA says this hack was mostly phishing and old-fashioned social engineering. I can’t tell whether the author thinks Homebrew is “an AI tool” (it’s not) or an unnamed AI tool was involved. It’s not even made clear that the devs were actually vibe coding, let alone how it contributed to the success of the hack. Regardless of how you feel about AI, let’s not abandon critical thinking.
Futurism_com is a lousy source. I think there is every reason to be critical of vibe coding but I hate it that this site is a source for so much stuff on Lemmy.
It’s a trash source that gets a lot of traffic because its editorial lean is anti-AI and it summarizes other paywalled sources. I’m not a fan, even if I’m also anti-AI.
Sounds like social engineering had a greater impact on this incident than vibe coding did.
this article makes it seem like Homebrew is something that only vibe coders use. in reality, Homebrew has thousands of projects on it that cover a very wide range of software. this is Futurism once again adopting a click-bait style that obscures the truth. they also tend to overly dramatize news in order to drum up clicks. looking at their site without an ad-blocker makes it obvious why they do this.
would such incompetence not invalidate insurance? at least significantly complicate claim?
I did some consulting work once for a bitcoin custodian. I learned that their insurance did not cover bitcoin in cold storage.
That’s what they get for not running the code though another AI and telling it to fix all the security flaws. /s
They forgot to add “make no mistakes” at the end of the prompt, noobs.
Everyone saying what a stupid obvious mistake it is assumes 1. There has ever been a fishing test where you can successfully get everyone in the company to not click the link that says “DONT CLICK THIS LINK” 2. Any dev that’s graduated since 2022 has had any proper training on package vetting/security hygiene/anything basic at all. The degree is now “just try to get the vibe code to compile.”
Yes it’s a stupid obvious mistake. Welcome to the modern world.
This is the most crypto bro thing ever. Stop storing coins on an exchange, holy. Crypto is already hazardous enough as it is.
He took a job interview on his work machine from a fake company that was actually the NK hacking group and was convinced to download the payload.
Beyond stupid to take an interview from your current employers machine.
I have not yet heard what happened after the payload was delivered. It’s also beyond stupid that one engineer’s laptop apparently had the credentials to shift $6 billion.
Wasn’t as simple as creds on the machine. Good write up: https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/11/03/north-korean-fake-job-interview-led-to-63b-binance-heist/5307398
I’m a school bus driver. Some of my coworkers recently tried putting tape over the on-bus cameras so they could get away with vaping and smoking and using their phones while driving. The stupidity required to think they could get away with this is mind-boggling. 1) They thought it would actually work in the sense that our bosses would not notice that the camera was not recording anything, and 2) they thought if it was detected that our bosses wouldn’t know it was them that put the tape up. Turns out the cameras are recording even when the buses are turned off and the little red light isn’t on.
I’m naturally opposed to the surveillance state, but I wouldn’t want to be taking action on this principle just so I could fucking smoke and use my phone while driving a school bus. Amazingly, my coworkers got nothing but a warning for this, and then we all got a sternly-worded letter telling us not to fuck with the cameras.
Frankly, I’m horrified at the idea of someone with so little self-preservation that they would turn off the security cameras in a school bus. The person that camera most helps is the bus driver.
I work as a substitute teacher, and frankly I WISH we had cameras in the classrooms. The horror stories I’ve heard? Kids are not above making false allegations against teachers they don’t like. Hell, groups of them will collude to do so to bring down a teacher they don’t like. Some kids a are just psychos. (Or more charitably, they simply haven’t morally matured.)
I’ve been lucky to not have this happen to me, but sometimes kids will just straight-up lie to cover for their own bad behavior, or to get back at a teacher that dared to discipline them. With regular teachers, they usually have enough protections to require a formal investigation. But with substitutes? Often schools or districts will just fire a sub and not think twice of it, even when an allegation is completely ridiculous. It’s easier to make the sub disappear than to thoroughly investigate a claim.
I WISH I had cameras in my classrooms. As a substitute, it would allow the teacher to directly see the kind of behavior their kids engage in while away, and to discipline the troublemakers accordingly. For regular teachers, it would both prevent false allegations and also prevent litigious parents of disruptive students from working the system. Plenty of parents think so little of teachers that they will believe a lying 6th grader over an adult, trained, and licensed teacher.
I wouldn’t feel any lack of privacy as a teacher from having cameras right in the classroom. I already have to deal with many eyes on me all day long. I work every day knowing I have to be careful with what I say or how I act.
I can understand why the students wouldn’t want cameras in the classroom. The bad kids don’t want accountability and everyone wants a little privacy. But for the school employee? It’s baffling to me why you wouldn’t want your workplace recorded. One false accusation can ruin your entire career.
Nobody got fired because no angry parents found out about this and showed up with lawyers. The people who get fired are the ones who actions turn into lawsuits against the school district.
I was a school bus driver for a while. The company sucked and I hated them. I vaped in front of the camera (only on an empty bus) and no one said anything.
The company
I think that’s your problem. Private school bus companies don’t give a fuck about anything, including (especially) their employees and whatever bullshit they get up to. Working for a school district that operates its own buses is the only way the job can be decent, although that’s a crap shoot. My district pays great (nearly $35 an hour) and provides excellent health insurance and even a pension if you survive ten years. Other districts in the area pay less than $25 per hour and provide no benefits.
Damn. That’s way better than what we have here. (this is in Canada)
There’s 2 school boards in my city and about 5 school bus companies who bid on routes.
They literally pay minimum wage with no benefits or anything.
I only did it because I was transitioning careers from driving trucks during the pandemic and nothing was happening in my chosen industry
I think it’s hilarious that the drivers thought kids wouldn’t gossip about the bus driver vaping. 😄
Do they not remember how fast stories about teachers fly through student bodies?
AFAIK they’ve never vaped on the bus with kids aboard, they do it when it’s empty or parked. I have seen them many times using their phones with kids aboard, though. There’s one driver that I never saw without her phone in one hand when I passed her; she was friends with the old transportation director so she was able to get away with anything, although the new director I think is trying to get rid of her. This driver hit two cars in one day and somehow still has her job.
This driver hit two cars in one day and somehow still has her job.
That seems borderline impossible but here we are in the age of zero accountability and madness.
I wonder if Binance has a similar work culture to FTX
FTX were a bunch of kids that had zero experience managing risk through down markets that overextended themselves. Binance let their guard down in an escalating cyber security risk environment. It’s a different kind of stupid.
There were never hacks before as we all know.
No fucking shit
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.
100% user error.
If you work (as in LITERALLY GET PAID TO DO SO) back/front end, IT or devops there’s absolutely no excuse to expose your digital self like an absolute fucking idiot not checking where the fuck are you & what the fuck are you running.
And specifically for crypto, it’s negligent to not put billions in a multisig wallet.
But Macs don’t have viruses!
Technically not a virus.
But who downloads homebrew from the web and not CLI?
Vibe coders
Thats precisely my point, yeah. Or some PM who thinks they’re a Dev now
Thats something I would absolutely do years ago before I got more familiar with cli and not as afraid of a terminal shell
Are you a Dev though?
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.
I think the same “professional” environment where whomever made the decisions for systems architecture thought that Production systems that deal with a shitton of money should be in the same network as machines which aren’t locked down like crazy and whose users can install whatever the fuck they want, is the kind of environment where people thinks vibe coding is great.
Incompetent idiots leading incompetent idiots.
If you don’t know enough to write the code yourself, you likely also don’t know enough to ask the right questions
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.
Bold of you to blame google, a malware company, for advertising malware.
Their specialty is mass surveillance and monetizing the results of it, so it’s a bit unfair to expect them to be competent in other domains.
I’ve noticed Futurism has a ton of clickbait headlines.
I should really switch to Piefed so I can block it as a source…
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.
Indeed.
Any half way decent software designer, systems designer or IT security specialist always assumes at least some people are idiots, or naive, or make mistakes even though they know better.
And it only takes one of those doing their thing once for an attacker to get in.
So they design their stuff taking that into account, which in this case means DESIGNING THE FUCKING NETWORK TOPOLOGY SO THAT THE FUCKING PRODUCTION MACHINES DEALING WITH FUCKING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS AREN’T EXPOSED TO PCs WHERE USERS CAN INSTALL ANY SHIT FROM THE INTERNET!
(Sorry, got a bit pissed of with the tremendous incompetence displayed by whomever is their systems designer or whomever didn’t hire a fucking senior systems designer to setup the IT infrastructure of a Finance company)
Mind you, in my career I’ve also worked in Startups and they think somebody who has 5 years experience is senior and put them in charge of shit they really shouldn’t be in charge of or probably even touch, so this isn’t surprising to me, even if it’s still infuriating.
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.
Some idiot put some other idiot, kid, or incompetent bullshitter in charge of designing the network for a Financial company and they did what idiots, inexperienced kids and incompetent bullshiters do and put the Production machines in the same network and easily accessible by machines were users can install any random shit from the Internet.
Sooner or later something like what happened now would’ve happened.
The fault is entirely with the decision maker who chose to have somebody else other than a senior expert design the systems architecture of a business that is supposed to safekeep billions of dollars.
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
deleted by creator
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 got a Captcha on some search result a few weeks ago that initially looked legitimate then came up with this.
It had put obfuscated code on my clipboard to download and run an executable.
This is partly on software devs these past 10-15 years. They’ve gotten so much lazier when it comes to making their software easy to install. Legitimate software often ends up having a 10-long list of instructions to install it.
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) -
Why the hell would you code (or do any serious work) on a Mac?
The only alternative is windows.
The worst part, honestly, is that when you ctrl+D a terminal, it says “shell has exited,” and then the window stays open.
Whoever made this decision should be flogged.
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.
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.
Yeah i write financial software now and we’re PCI compliant. Devs can’t access prod or its very limited and read only with no access to encryption keys. Those who do have prod access, don’t have write access to the code. No one has both.
All software installs on any company device are reported to ops.
I’m not saying this couldn’t happen but i think it would be way more difficult. Also, we’re a company of 15 people.
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.
