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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

In this case, the KVMs are plugged into multiple laptops being run in people's basement/spare bedroom, it seems. Someone will earn a set amount per laptop per month, to accept a company-supplied laptop (from a us company) then plug in one of these little KVMs to give a remote worker access without as much ease in detection.

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The Wall Street Journal had an article about the people running these North Korean laptop farms.

https://www.wsj.com/business/north-korea-remote-jobs-e4daa72...

> "I live in a travel trailer. I don’t have running water; I don’t have a working bathroom. And now I don’t have heat,” she said. “I’m really scared. I don’t know what to do."

Whn people have no solutions for basic problems they become the problem.

So the main difference over more typical remote desktop methods is that it pretends to be a physical display and keyboard to fool the PC it's remoting into in if it's overly locked down?

Feels like there's otherwise a hundred different ways to already do remote control without any extra hardware.

> Feels like there's otherwise a hundred different ways to already do remote control without any extra hardware

This way the worker doesn't have to know 100 different ways to remote into the machine, just one

All the alternatives have a risk of setting off D&R tripwires. Assuming these things can spoof their device IDs so they look like a Logitech keyboard etc, I think the cost of the hardware setup is gonna easily pay for itself in terms of harder detection.

What does "D&R" stand for in this context?

Detection and response - basically any remote access software usage is very likely to trigger an alert to the IT security team, either from the antivirus or EDR (endpoint detection and response, the most famous is Crowdstrike)

The most infamous at this point one could say.

Either way you've heard of them :)

> amount per laptop per month

Curious what typical rates would be.

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