North Korean IT Workers Are Being Exposed on a Massive Scale
wired.com
North Korea’s IT workers are prolific in their activities, often trying to infiltrate multiple companies simultaneously by using stolen identities or creating false personas to try to appear legitimate. Some use freelance platforms; others try to recruit international facilitators to run laptop farms. While their online personas may be fake, the country—where millions do not have basic human rights or access to the internet—steers talented children into its education pipeline where they can become skilled developers and hackers. That means many of the IT workers and hackers are likely to know each other, potentially since they were children. Despite being technically adept, they often leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs in their wake.
Pyongyang’s IT workers have been operating for the best part of a decade, but attention on their activities has intensified in the past 12 months as Fortune 500 companies realized they have inadvertently hired North Koreans. Teams of hackers and IT workers are set “earnings quotas” by Kim Jong Un’s regime, Barnhart says, with IT workers operating from multiple North Korean military and intelligence organizations.