North Korea’s Innovative Laptop Farm Scam Alarms Cybersecurity Experts

A group of software engineers, many of whom secretly work on behalf of North Korea, has infiltrated major U.S. companies, many of which are Fortune 500 companies, by masquerading as American developers to obtain money from them. This has been confirmed by a coordinated investigation conducted by the U.S Treasury Department, State Department, and the FBI. This elaborate deception, which has been performed for several years, has allowed North Korea to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year. 

It has been reported that these operatives, embedded within legitimate remote workforces, have been sending their earnings back to Pyongyang so that they will be used to finance Pyongyang’s prohibited weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. National security officials and cybersecurity experts alike are both alarmed by the scale and sophistication of this operation. Because it represents a massive manipulation of the global digital economy to finance a sanctioned regime’s military ambitions, it has raised serious security concerns. 

As detailed in a recent report published by Google’s Mandiant division, this North Korean operative pursued employment opportunities within high-level sectors whose security has been deemed especially sensitive, including defence contractors and government agencies within the United States.
Apparently, the individual was engaged in a sophisticated pattern of deceiving recruiters, using fabricated references a

[…]
Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.