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North Korean infiltrator caught working in Amazon IT department thanks to lag — 110ms keystroke input raises red flags over true location (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/technology@hexbear.net
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[–] 31 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

Normally, a U.S.-based remote worker’s computer would send keystroke data within tens of milliseconds.

How does Amazon know when they actually pressed the key?

"I asked him via Slack how the project was progressing, and it took 800 ms for him to start typing a reply! We expect no less than 300 ms here at Amazon."

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    Easiest way I can come up with would be to have the keylogger send timestamps with the keystrokes, which would be compared with the time at the server that receives them.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    The system time on computers is typically off by a couple seconds.

    I can understand how the server could measure the latency by pinging the computer, but that doesn't involve keystrokes at all.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    You check the latency if the remote machine from the machine being remoted into, you dont need to corroborate that witha server. Im not an expert but it sounds plausible, even though remoting into the work machine is still a bigger flag to me

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