Dictator Kim Jong-un, a red-blue flag with a star and an impoverished, isolated country – that’s almost all that many people in the West know about North Korea. It could be that some people – especially in IT jobs – work with colleagues from North Korea without knowing it.
The one colleague who joined the company during the pandemic and has never shown up in the office: possibly a North Korean. An agent? Not necessarily. North Korea is known for not being squeamish when it comes to raising foreign currency for dictator Kim Jong-un’s weapons program. The North Korean one Cyber army is reportedly 7,000 strong and has already digitally robbed banks, stolen cryptocurrencies and used ransomware to blackmail companies all over the world on behalf of the dictator. And numerous hacker groups have been infiltrating Western companies for years in order to obtain information and technologies that are useful for the regime.
What the Cybersecurity company Palo Alto has now revealed, however, goes one step further and only has a limited connection with hacking. In a bizarre twist of labor globalization, the country is apparently sending IT specialists to apply for well-paid jobs abroad. Not so much to hack the company, but simply to do the job. And so good that they keep him. The money earned (somehow legally) ends up (illegally) with the dictator in Pyongyang via small detours.
Fake applicants do real work
The cybersecurity firm found not only malware on servers linked to North Korean activities, but also application forms, false documents, telephone numbers and question and answer lists that applicants can use to prepare for job interviews. The fake applicants also had well-maintained Linkedin and Github profiles that had been maintained for a long time.
The US FBI had already warned companies about the unusual campaign in October, cyber experts such as Mandiant’s top hacker hunter, John Hultquist, told the AP news agencythat similar attempts by the regime have been going on for a decade. But until the pandemic, there were few companies that embraced fully remote workers. That has changed with Corona. The FBI estimates that there are several thousand North Korean IT workers who generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue every year. That’s not surprising. An annual salary in software development in the USA can easily exceed $100,000.
The guest workers from the Far East are not an immediate problem for the companies affected. As long as they do their job well, many bosses probably don’t want to know where they come from. Managers should still think about how to keep the proportion of North Korean colleagues to a minimum. After all, the companies could be seen as accomplices in evading sanctions, and the USA is no laughing matter. The obligatory weekly day in the office suddenly has one more argument for it.