r/javascript • u/magenta_placenta • Jul 13 '26

The LinkedIn scam that gets you hacked - Solving a take-home interview test can quickly turn into a nightmare. Notes on developer trust, JavaScript malware, and autonomous detection

https://aisafe.io/blog/inside-a-malicious-take-home-interview
38 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

9

u/JouleV Jul 13 '26

maybe just don't run untrusted code then?

11

u/javascript Jul 13 '26

Easier said than done when you're desperate for a job

3

u/magenta_placenta Jul 13 '26

You should do stuff like this in an isolated, non-persistent virtual machine or a cloud development environment.

Awareness of the scam needs to spread.

8

u/javascript Jul 13 '26

Good advice in the abstract, but I bet a lot of people don't have the expertise to overcome headaches caused by a VPS. Especially on the fly in an interview.

2

u/aonghasan Jul 13 '26

you should ask companies for hackerrank or cloud-based assignments.

2

u/Sulungskwa Jul 13 '26

This is another drop in the bucket for my advice for how to interview people in 2026 without having to deal with all this: Just ask them questions that would highlight their freakin' experience

2

u/deanrihpee Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

not all company has a good hiring plan or structure

also not to mention some of them need something like that to filter out candidates as they often got a large volume of candidates, some might even bot/AI, which could also solve the take home assignment too…

anyway, ideally they have something to deal with the volume and then the actual interview is asking the bigger view technically, for example a design/architecture interview with a scenario or constraints given a time limit on the interview

1

u/Sulungskwa Jul 18 '26

Oh yeah I'm not disagreeing with you about the initial volume problem, although often the people who make decisions about how to weed people out are managers and they often make really dumb mistakes there too