Few things are more strenuous than finding new employment— but even worse is when a potential new employer turns out to be fake and is instead using an apparent job opportunity as a way to infect you with malware. Per a report from Reversing Labs, a leading cybersecurity firm, this has been happening to Python developers courtesy of North Korean hackers for about a year, and is likely to continue.
These particular attacks from North Korean state-funded hacking team Lazarus Group are new, but the overall malware campaign against the Python development community has been running since at least August of 2023, when a number of popular open source Python tools were maliciously duplicated with added malware. Now, though, there are also attacks involving "coding tests" that only exist to get the end user to install hidden malware on their system (cleverly hidden with Base64 encoding) that allows remote execution once present. The capacity for exploitation at that point is pretty much unlimited, due to the flexibility of Python and how it interacts with the underlying OS. This is a good time to refer to PEP 668 which enforces virtual environments for non-system wide Python installs.
