How to compromise your system with a job interview

Sophisticated threat actors are conducting targeted phishing campaigns impersonating legitimate companies through LinkedIn to distribute multi-stage malware via fake coding interviews, ultimately compromising developer systems to extract sensitive credentials, private keys, cryptocurrency wallets, and enable remote access. This attack vector exploits the tight IT job market and bypasses traditional security by leveraging npm package execution during development setup, gaining access to environment variables containing database credentials, API keys, and other critical secrets. IT organizations face elevated risk as developers are prime targets, and compromised developer machines can serve as pivot points for enterprise network infiltration.