A North Korean imposter was uncovered, working as a sysadmin at Amazon U.S., after their keystroke input lag raised suspicions with security specialists at the online retail giant. Normally, a U.S.-based remote worker’s computer would send keystroke data within tens of milliseconds. This suspicious individual’s keyboard lag was “more than 110 milliseconds,” reports Bloomberg.
Amazon is commendably proactive in its pursuit of impostors, according to the source report. The news site talked with Amazon’s Chief Security Officer, Stephen Schmidt, about this fascinating new case of North Koreans trying to infiltrate U.S. organizations to raise hard currency for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and sometimes indulge in espionage and/or sabotage.
If you’re on an ssh connection to a server, they can probably track the keystroke latency and average out over time. All network packets have timestamps, so you can know the latency of each one. If it’s consistently high, that’s unlikely to be a fluke or temporary network slowness.
Tcp/ip packets don’t have timestamps. They wouldn’t be reliable even if they did. And they certainly wouldn’t be “millisecond accurate”.
But apparently they remotely used a laptop located in the US, so from there it should’ve been fine, no? Unless it was simply used as a proxy.