this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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I wasn't joking.
A good chunk of scam calls and texts come from people who themselves are victims of kidnapping. Many of those victims (primarily in Asia) got into the position they were in because they were looking for work, went to a different country to start a promised job, and then got trapped and forced to work for scam centers that do social engineering attacks.
These scam centers are sophisticated to the point where they can develop very legitimate-looking crypto trading platforms for targets in the US and other wealthy countries. They then assign one of the kidnapped people to a target. These kidnapped people then social engineer their way for months to get what their captors want - usually money in the aforementioned trading platform. Then, they cut all contact once they have control of the funds.
How does this relate to XZ? Well, if they can kidnap ordinary people looking for jobs, there's not much stopping them from including devs in their pool of targets. Afterward, it's just a rinse and repeat of what they'd done before.
If you want to look more into pig butchering, John Oliver has a great episode on it.
You don’t kidnap extremely highly skilled internet malware developers and force them to code for you, you just pay them appropriately.
Jupp. If you trap someone highly skilled and give that person a weapon, the chances are good that this person will use that against you.
Like how does a less skilled person know that this code will not send location to the police with a message?
A bit late, but the police are often paid by captors, so calling the police just leads to punishment.
The malware, sure, but you're ignoring how they were able to push the malware in the first place.