Glut of Fake LinkedIn Profiles Pits HR Against the Bots

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/10/glut-of-fake-linkedin-profiles-pits-hr-against-the-bots/

by todsacerdoti • 4 years ago

115 98 4 years ago

civilized• 4 years ago

"Hmm, https://virus.def.inite.ly looks shady, but all the Fortune 500 CISOs are posting I need to download this immediately or my computer will blow up"

tyingq• 4 years ago

I'm wondering how well Google is going to fare against the next wave of things like GPT-3, DALL-E, etc. The quality of content+link farms, comment spammers, etc, is going to continue to improve.

aquaduck• 4 years ago

My cynical prediction: Google search (as we now know it) will be retired. Google will provide AI-generated text which attempts to answer the user's prompt, with links to results in a handful of curated sources such as wikipedia.

fny• 4 years ago

I already use GPT for this purpose, and it works terrifyingly well. You can even ask it for citations, and it provides you with a link.

Beware--it's prone to bullshitting. This one time I asked it for the symptoms for pulmonary hypertension: shortness of breath, chest pain, lightheadedness, and fainting. Check. Then I asked it for a citation...

It linked me to an article on hemorrhoids.

stevewatson301• 4 years ago

Their fields of research, such as large language models and image generation and the newly demoed “multi search” feature all strongly point towards this being the case.

joegibbs• 4 years ago

How would this work with new information, e.g. breaking news? Would Google be manually putting in anything new that comes up or would they have the legacy Google crawler running in the background to feed to the AI system?

theonlybutlet• 4 years ago

How will Google monetise this though?

thatjoeoverthr• 4 years ago

I’ve started doing this already. Just last week I had a question about how to interpret labeling on construction wood. Google came up with nothing for SEO spam. GPT3 explained it completely.

nickfromseattle• 4 years ago

Google search (as we now know it) will be retired.

I think so too, but I think it's still pretty far out.

In order to do this, Google's AI-generated text needs to be better than the web results they return today, 100% of the time. It's the same reason why Google has never made 100% of the first 10 results ads. If users make a search and advertisers aren't bidding on the keyword, Google will return 0 results, and the user is less likely to come back and make a new search.

Google's AI needs to consistently be better than the content created by webmasters. Across billions (trillions?) of different search phrases.

Maybe there is an intermediary step where Google uses AI-generated text in a small subset of searches, and then expands out gradually. But there is so many unique searches it seems like a tall task.

Also, if Google displaces webmasters with AI-generated content, what incentives do websites have to create the new content Google will need to train their AI on to answer whatever humans want to know over the next 50 years?

rishsriv• 4 years ago

Algorithmically generated content by itself might not be a bad thing for users' search experience IMO, as long as the engine can differentiate between "right" and "gibberish" content.

Linking to verified sources (research papers, official websites, verified social media accounts) when writing about these topics might make this easier. LLMs will then be able to understand if one if misrepresenting what was stated in the linked sources or not.

malandrew• 4 years ago

Any sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content.

djohnston• 4 years ago

LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to avoid site integrity issues because there is an honest to god source of truth - HR itself. Federate the data custody and allow company and employee to publish who is working where.

tdeck• 4 years ago

That puts companies in control over if and when their employees can advertise their work history. I'm not sure that's something I'd want, since updating a LinkedIn profile is many peoples' first step to finding a new job.

rootusrootus• 4 years ago

Yeah, I wouldn't want my employer to have any control whatsoever over my LinkedIn profile. I would abandon the service instantly if that were to happen.

CharlesW• 4 years ago

…there is an honest to god source of truth - HR itself.

Or alternatively (and what LinkedIn is doing), employees can "open their employee-only experience" by verifying their work email address associated with a company.

nitwit005• 4 years ago

That is already public for things like executive positions, but you'll still have the problem of verifying that it's the actual person creating the account.

xxs• 4 years ago

That would fail in the EU regulatory wise (GDPR)

tpxl2• 4 years ago

Wot. Manually approving who works for your company doesn't run afoul of GDPR.

nottorp4• 4 years ago

honest to god source of truth - HR itself.

Is that why most career advice includes "HR is not your friend"?

swores• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what question you're asking them, or what point you're trying to make if it was rhetorical.

Surely most people who agree with not trusting HR departments would still say that it's OK for the HR department of a company you've chosen to work for to, well, know that you work at that company.

electroly• 4 years ago

What company would ever voluntarily publish their employees list to a site used by people to find new jobs?

smt88• 4 years ago

I'm also seeing these used to spam people with sales pitches.

Fake profiles seem incredibly easy to avoid because LinkedIn is one of the few "real identity" social networks.

I can only conclude that they don't care.

webdoodle• 4 years ago

LinkedIn is creating an excuse to purge people, not fake profiles. Like most of the corporate social media sites, it is heavily censoring people who speak out on subjects they are experts on. Covid and Ukraine being high on the list, but even disparaging Queen Elizabeth will get your account restricted.

Double_a_92• 4 years ago

Unless you work in the medical field or for the military, why would you even talk about such irrelavant things?

suoduandao26• 4 years ago

Well now, Robert Malone was recently deplatformed for his views on the Covid Response[1], despite being an expert in the sort of tech used to build these vaccines with citations going back to at least 1990. I'd hardly call his opinion 'irrelavant'.

[1]https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0ZCLBEbktYqp1lSheZS81E

hsbauauvhabzb• 4 years ago

I constantly have to contact LI to remove users from my company l, LI requires a 4 week window for the account to respond to the removal request. My company is less than 10 people and I’m marked as the founder on LI.

All I can say is good. The sooner LI put in actual usable controls, the better.

walrus013• 4 years ago

You know the scene in the 2014 Godzilla movie where the Japanese Godzilla expert says "Let them fight..."?

That's pretty much my reaction to recruiters and HR wasting time on linkedin bots.

ramraj07• 4 years ago

Until it becomes standard practice to require verified LinkedIn work history.

walrus013• 4 years ago

What's when I move to a yurt in the forest

z9znz• 4 years ago

That will never happen. LinkedIn has long since peaked. Since it became cluttered with odd influencer types posting largely meaningless fluff, and more and more recruiters who make no effort to read candidate pages before spamming, its value has continually declined each year.

rkho• 4 years ago

All the greater motivation for people to grind for independence from the rat race.

sam1r• 4 years ago

> Until it becomes standard practice to require verified LinkedIn work history.

Unless LinkedIn truly believes they are the new standard practice of work history.

robin_reala• 4 years ago

In my entire career I’ve never had a LinkedIn account, I’ve never had LinkedIn brought up in an interview, and I’ve never looked at an interviewee’s LinkedIn account. It’s nowhere near as important as the industry seems to think.

shapefrog• 4 years ago

I feel the same way about bots wasting recruiters and HR's time as recruiters and HR feel about wasting my time.

belter• 4 years ago

I always though LinkedIn had pivoted years ago, into a Dating Site. Are they still doing recruiting? :-)

miked85• 4 years ago

LinkedIn seemed useful at first (10+ years ago), now it really is just a source of spam and "recruiters" sending emails for totally irrelevant jobs.

toast0• 4 years ago

I worked at a large internet company when LinkedIn was growing. It was an immense source of spam because it encouraged people to upload the whole address book. And for years, they wouldn't let you tell them not to send you anything else unless you created an account, which yeah, not going to create an account at viral spam central, thanks.

specialist• 4 years ago

I once arranged a date. 2007. My date said "I'm glad LinkedIn's good for something."

nottorp4• 4 years ago

... but HR are bots.

90% of those on Linkedin at least.

k3liutZu• 4 years ago

So... when do we reach the point where bots hire other bots?

(Or are we there already?)

nottorp4• 4 years ago

As long as money changes hands it counts as a GDP increase right?

origin_path• 4 years ago

It's curious how every single fake profile is of a woman. Suggestive of honey trapping, perhaps, but then why so many accounts.

glouwbug• 4 years ago

It's like reverse tinder

ReptileMan• 4 years ago

I hope bots win. They will show more humanity than HR.

6stringmerc2• 4 years ago

But then out of work HR people might learn how to program bots in their image…shudder…

ianpurton• 4 years ago

I don't understand. Why would someone create lots of fake profiles?

martin_a• 4 years ago

The most obvious reasons might be spam or stealing contact information from the site. Those profiles could also be used for mass-liking of posts, to trick the algorithms for the feed.

bryanrasmussen4• 4 years ago

well we have been seeing fake people going for jobs posts here, so if you create

profiles A,B,C

C gets enticing job offer from recruiter You hire actual user D you based your profile on to take tests etc.

You get job offer but we need recommendations

Please talk to my friends A and B!

Eumenes• 4 years ago

Recruiting firms often create fake developer profiles to attract other recruiters messages. Then, they'll recruit for that ideal profile and present the candidate blindly to the companies HR or hiring managers, hoping to secure a relationship/placement fee.

mouzogu• 4 years ago

AI bots vs HR bots, popcorn time.

woutr_be• 4 years ago

All you have to do to beat an HR bot is request a JD, the company and a salary. 95% of recruiters refuse to answer this. (At least based on my experience)

Bouncingsoul1• 4 years ago

Back in the days before I got into SWDev, I was working as eventtech(sound/light), which is quite a shady buisness at time. Most companies only have minimum employees and hire freelancer when needed, for events obviously. Anyway since not all events are successfull, paying and agreements may not always be honoured, which results in lot of backtalk and rumour regarding liquidity and/or payment practice of said companies. Anyway of course this was also mirrored in online discussion of specific forums, for Germany especially in the PAForum. The answer from PAForum to counter fake accounts was actual proof of identity, by sending a copy of passport and a phone call. This made this forum no1. for jobs and feedback about companies, since people needed to add their reputation for it. Services are hard to scale and need a lot of moderation but for specific needs it may make sense.

dijonman2• 4 years ago

As a hiring manager I’m encountering a tremendous amount of hiring fraud. One person interviews and another shows up.

I have seen most of this activity with an address out of the DC area and I suspect they do this systematically and collect 2-3 weeks pay until fired at multiple companies.

burpee• 4 years ago

There's thousands of bots with obviously recognizable pictures from Thisdoesnotexist on both LinkedIn and Quora. Quora is arguably more insidious as these are ranked and spreading huge amounts of disinformation. Someone should really step in and create a neural network to recognize and flag artificially generated profiles

Tyr42• 4 years ago

Wouldn't that be a GAN but with more steps?

bambax• 4 years ago

I recently created a fake LinkedIn account, because I don't like the fact that some users are notified when I lookup their profile, and it's impossible to use LinkedIn without being logged in.

The fake profile is an ordinary tech worker, not esp. skilled in anything and with a short work experience; but it's a lot of fun to be fake... My alter ego has 50+ connections now. There are moments when it feels quite real...

Glut of Fake LinkedIn Profiles Pits HR Against the Bots

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