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The Fake Interview

The Fake Interview

Written by: Red Asgard
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About this listen

The Fake Interview is a narrative security investigation about how a fake coding interview became a global credential-theft operation.

Across the series, valh4x and Red Asgard Security Research trace a DPRK-linked, Lazarus-attributed campaign from malicious developer repositories to exposed command-and-control infrastructure, blockchain dead drops, malware payloads, operator mistakes, victim data, and the uncomfortable question every threat hunter eventually faces: who is watching whom?

This show is built for security researchers, developers, threat intelligence teams, Web3 engineers, and anyone who wants to understand how modern social-engineering operations actually work.

Topics include fake recruiter personas, malicious coding tests, developer compromise, C2 infrastructure, malware analysis, credential theft, blockchain abuse, OPSEC failures, and the defender lessons learned from following the evidence.

Attribution is handled carefully. The show distinguishes between confirmed technical evidence, high-confidence assessment, and unresolved questions.

© 2026 Red Asgard
Episodes
  • Real Blood on the Wire

    Real Blood on the Wire
    Apr 29 2026

    The first episode of The Fake Interview begins with the moment the honeypot theory died.

    After earlier reporting raised the possibility that the infrastructure might be staged for researchers, the backend answered with something harder to dismiss: real developer machines, real credential records, real local development environments, and victims across dozens of countries.

    This episode follows how a fake job interview became an execution environment. A message. A call. A repository. A project that needed to run locally. From there, the campaign turned ordinary developer workflows into a credential-theft pipeline.

    In this episode:

    • why localhost ports like 3000 and 5173 mattered
    • how fake interviews target the normal habits of software work
    • why developer laptops create organizational blast radius
    • why the exposed records killed the honeypot theory
    • what researchers owe victims once real credentials appear
    • why the audio version avoids reusable access details

    This episode does not include victim records, credentials, campaign extraction steps, hardcoded secrets, or instructions for accessing adversary infrastructure.

    Companion notes and defensive guidance are available from Red Asgard.

    A Red Asgard narrative series on the Contagious Interview campaign and the investigation that followed it.

    Research, narration, and production: Yevhen Pervushyn / Red Asgard.

    No victim records, credentials, hardcoded secrets, or reusable access details are included in the audio version.
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    26 mins
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