Security News > 2023 > December > Blockchain dev's wallet emptied in "job interview" using npm package
A blockchain developer shares his ordeal over the holidays when he was approached on LinkedIn by a "Recruiter" for a web development job.
The recruiter in question asked the developer to download npm packages from a GitHub repository, and hours later the developer discovered his MetaMask wallet had been emptied.
Antalya-based Murat Çeliktepe, a blockchain and web developer, shared this week how he was approached by a "Recruiter" on LinkedIn with an Upwork job posting that looked legitimate.
Moments later, the developer discovered that his MetaMask wallet had been drained-with upwards of $500 siphoned out of his account, based on the information seen by BleepingComputer.
"My MetaMask wallet was completely emptied... under the pretext of the interview process and job assignment, my entire wallet was completely emptied in a way that I don't yet understand exactly how," wrote Çeliktepe in Turkish on social media.
An Istanbul-based bug bounty hunter hypothesized that the npm projects ran by the developer effectively paved the means for the attacker to deploy a reverse shell, by opening up port 5000 on his machine that began "Listening" for connections.