Fake North Korean IT workers sneaking into healthcare, finance, and AI The North Korean IT worker threat extends well beyond tech companies, with fraudsters interviewing at a "surprising" number of healthcare orgs, according to Okta Threat Intelligence. In research published Tuesday, the identity services provider said nearly half of the companies (48 percent) targeted by the scam fall outside …
And free backup of key corporate data to Pyongyang. What's not to like?
Seriously, though, I am startled at how lax some companies' hiring practices must be. When I recently found myself "resting between engagements" as actors would phrase it, I had to jump through hoops with every job interview. In my own new role, we've hired several new colleagues since I joined, and in the process interviewed a dozen times as many; every one involved various steps that I won't detail, to ensure that the people we were interviewing & hiring were who they claimed to be.
What sort of company hires for mid-range roles on the strength of a couple of easily-spoofed Teams video calls?
Call me crazy, but how does it make sense to describe what's going on here as a "scam" involving "fake workers"? A company hires a worker to do a job, the job gets done, the company pays the worker, everybody goes their separate ways, then maybe the worker's North Korean identity gets discovered after the fact. Is the company somehow being deceived into thinking work was performed when it actually wasn't? Is North Korea a magical land where polished IT work output springs from the ground fully-formed, without the involvement of flesh-and-blood human IT workers?
One of the laugh lines in the South Park spinoff movie "Team America" (which ironically has Kim Jong-Il and North Korea as the arch bad guys) is a dopey celebrity liberal trying to describe a nefarious plot by "corporations", yet struggling to articulate what the nefarious plot is actually supposed to be, aside from the inherent nefariousness of anything done by "corporations". Paraphrasing that line:
"Let me explain to you how this works: you see, the North Koreans finance the remote IT workers, and then the remote IT workers go out... and the North Koreans sit there in their... in their North Korea buildings, and... and, and see, they're all North Korea-y... and they make money."
