Kessler, a journalist, on how a crypto founder worked out that a remote hire was really a North Korean IT worker. About half of that company's staff turned out to be North Korean, and Kessler says nearly every company hiring remote workers now has to think about this.
…You know, we got this weird email from the FBI. And he sends me the email and there's crypto addresses in it. And from there, I kind of stumble on this like whole web of over a dozen companies in crypto that we were at least able to name that had hired North Korean? to work on their software.
…who you're getting at half price because your money spends further in North Korean? than it does in like Minneapolis, he has a very high incentive to turn around and pilfer documents, hack your company. He is loyal to Kim Jong-un's regime. He's not loyal to like whatever your crypto project is.
Absolutely. I mean, one of the companies that I found to have hired these workers, as I was in the reporting process in final fact checking, got hacked. This guy who realized that I forget the exact number of employees, but around half end up being North Korean?. But the first employee that he realizes was suspicious, it came to his attention because they pretended that they were in Japan. And at some point, they said that there was an earthquake. And so they missed a meeting. And this company founder, he looks up Earthquakes Tokyo, which is where the worker said he was based. And there was no earthquake that day. So, okay, that's weird, but you kind of just, you know, whatever. It's just note it, you know? And then the guy comes back eventually. I think he took a day or two off of work and he just had a completely different accent. So at that point, he says to himself, okay, there's something weird here. And it's only been in the past year or so that this has become a thing that virtually every company in the United States, but not just in the United States that hires remote workers has had to think about.
So, okay, so phase one was crypto. Crypto ends, essentially. I mean, like crypto still exists, but crypto is like a dominant technology story as a thing that a lot of people are spending a lot of time on has greatly diminished. And you have these workers who the North Korean? government, they have…
Yeah. So over the past year, my colleagues, Emma, Bob, and I have been looking at this North Korean? IT work problem from a broader lens. And we saw just this one group alone applying to companies across basically any industry that you can think of. I mean, like banks and financial institutions…
lots of people are working with North Korean? right now.