[HN Gopher] The Axios supply chain attack used individually targ...
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       The Axios supply chain attack used individually targeted social
       engineering
        
       Author : cmitsakis
       Score  : 26 points
       Date   : 2026-04-03 14:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
        
       | jruohonen wrote:
       | "the meeting said something on my system was out of date. i
       | installed the missing item as i presumed it was something to do
       | with teams, and this was the RAT."
       | 
       | Oh dear.
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | That's the bit that scares me. I've often found myself
         | installing software in a hurry to join a meeting on some
         | platform that I've not previously used via my current machine.
         | 
         | The time pressure means I'm less likely to pay attention to
         | what I'm installing.
        
           | pvtmert wrote:
           | IMO, rushing things never helps. If possible, I investigate
           | external calls/meetings well in-advance, at worst case, I add
           | 30-minute calendar block before those. (To prepare and
           | install/update things).
           | 
           | As a DevOps, I have seen the quote about "premature
           | optimisation's root of all evil" in real life quite often. In
           | fact, optimising one bottleneck quickly yields another one
           | -moving the goalpost further-, potentially increasing
           | business-impact if the flow is not contained properly.
           | 
           | Especially during incidents, _rushing_ to fix often yields
           | more problems. I've seen people isolating/shutting-down
           | mildly misbehaving instances. Causing excessive load to the
           | remaining and starting the cascading failure like dominos
           | falling one after another.
           | 
           | Which reminds me a scene from "The Office", where Dwight goes
           | rogue and conducts a "Fire-Drill" by locking doors and
           | deliberately causing smoke. Everyone panics and hell breaks
           | loose. This is at the beginning of the episode, maybe
           | 5-minutes tops. I show this at the incident-management
           | training, this is how people behave in real life. No joke.
           | 
           | To give more concrete aspect on the moving goalpost: SWEs
           | improve transaction processing with multi-threading, but that
           | causes more connections/transactions to the database. Even
           | though theoretical gains are Nx (n-times depending on
           | threads/cores), real life gains are 1.2x-1.3x, because
           | database connections are getting occupied. As the next step,
           | increasing number of DB connections helps, maybe add another
           | master node (risk of having deadlocks increase, but ignore
           | for now for the sake of argument). But then the disk IO
           | becomes the bottleneck due to write-heavy (payments domain).
           | Then we add Redis to reduce load, and maybe some asynchronous
           | processing. At this point complexity increases and we need to
           | solve rare occurrences of duplicate data or race-conditions
           | because it is not single-threaded process anymore...
        
         | stevenicr wrote:
         | I had a job offer interview sent to me a couple weeks ago that
         | ended like this.
         | 
         | Everything was normal messaging. Back and forth. Got the invite
         | to schedule a google meet. All looked like all the other
         | things.
         | 
         | Day of meeting, click the google meet button in the email..
         | redirect to a browser screen showing that google meet needs an
         | update, this is the microsoft store.
         | 
         | Rush, hurry, meeting will be late!
         | 
         | except it was not the msoft store it was all fake.
         | 
         | I wish indeed and other job sites shared more info about these
         | (like fake company signed up with a fake email from a vpn to
         | publish this job listing that possibly infected 1,000
         | computers- and some are reporting X Y Or Z (ransom, whatever)
        
       | PufPufPuf wrote:
       | I wonder if I would have been saved by my absolute disdain for
       | installing anything Microsoft Teams-related on my computer. The
       | web version works fine _, thanks.
       | 
       | _ Up to usual Microsoft Teams standards
        
       | skrtskrt wrote:
       | As a general rule I install none of these web conferencing things
       | on my machine. Either the browser version works fine, as Google
       | Meet, Zoom, Teams and even WebEx all do, or this is not a meeting
       | I need to be on.
        
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       (page generated 2026-04-03 23:01 UTC)