Legal uncertainties and reputational risks contribute to the silence surrounding North Korean IT fraud, making it harder to address. North Korea exploits high-paying remote job roles in the U.S. to generate revenue. The scale of the problem has become apparent to companies and security experts. North Korean workers, some of whom are highly skilled, are involved in stealing intellectual property and engaging in other illicit activities. The complexity of the operations makes it difficult for firms to identify and eliminate these fraudulent applicants effectively.
"They've been stealing intellectual property and then working on the projects themselves," Michael "Barni" Barnhart, principal investigator at DTEX Systems, told Axios. "They're going to use AI to magnify exponentially what they're already doing - and what they're doing now is bad."
This is a precious revenue stream that evades American sanctions - capitalizing on the wealth of high-paying remote worker roles in the U.S. to route cash back to Pyongyang.
Some of the world's biggest firms have found it devilishly difficult to weed out North Korean job applicants because the operation has become as complex as a multi-national corporation.
The undercover North Korean IT workers are often exceptional at their jobs - at least until they start stealing sensitive data or extorting companies that try to fire them.
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