North Korean Fake
Employees Are
Everywhere!
How to Protect Your
Organization
by Roger A. Grimes
Data-Driven Defense Evangelist
1
North Korean Fake Employees Are Everywhere!
How To Protect Your Organization
Table of Contents
Introduction 2
Legal Consequences of Knowingly Hiring a North Korean Employee 3
KnowBe4’s North Korean Fake Employee Hire 3
Background on North Korean Fake Employees 6
Evolution 7
Growing Warnings and Other Sources 8
General Infrastructure 10
Laptop Farms 11
Inbound/Outbound Strategies 13
Other Fake Employers and Fake Employees 13
Intentions 15
Signs of a North Korean Fake Employee 15
How To Protect Your Organization 17
Summary 19
It is likely that thousands of organizations around the world
are accidentally hiring North Korean fakeemployees.
INTRODUCTION
On July 23, 2024, KnowBe4 publicly released information about how a North Korean “fake
employee” was accidentally hired and detected (https://blog.knowbe4.com/how-a-north-korean-
fake-it-worker-tried-to-inltrate-us).
In some ways, we were lucky, but we worked extremely hard to be prepared for our “luck.”
Wedetected the fake employee very quickly after they started to access the laptop we had sent
them in unusual ways. We shut down their corporate access within 25 minutes of our rst security
alert. At no time did they have access to customer data.
After we published our account,
several other organizations and law
enforcement agencies thanked us
for publicly posting about the “North
Korean fake employee” problem. It
turns out that many other companies
had done the same thing but kept their
experiences private for various reasons
and fears. Our public revelation
appears to have opened up a cascade
of public information sharing.
Within a few weeks, we heard from over a dozen other companies who either hired North Korean
employees or had been besieged by a multitude of fake resumes and applications submitted by
North Koreans hoping to get a job with their organization. Many organizations contacting us (or in
some cases, we contacted them) asked that we keep their information and experiences private or
anonymized, while a few others publicly posted about their own experiences.
It turns out that the North Korean fake employee problem is a complex, industrial, scaled nation-
state operation, and it is likely that thousands of organizations around the world have or are now
involved in accidentally hiring North Korean fake employees.
“Within a few weeks, we heard from over
a dozen other companies who either
hired North Korean employees or had
been besieged by a multitude of fake
resumes and applications...”
2
Hundreds of U.S. companies have done so. We know of Fortune 500 companies that accidentally
hired North Korean fake employees and many much smaller companies (12 employees, 20
employees, etc.) that did the same. It is a serious risk for any company with remote-only employees.
This whitepaper will share what the North Korean fake employee industry is like, share many of
the signs of dealing with North Korean fake employees, and discuss many ways organizations can
update their hiring policies to prevent hiring such employees.
Note: North Korea is ocially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Legal Consequences of Knowingly Hiring a North Korean Employee
It is illegal for a United States-based or U.S.-located organization (and other United Nations
members) to knowingly hire a North Korean due to U.S. law and United Nations (UN) sanctions.
In 2017, UN Security Council resolution 2375 (https://main.un.org/securitycouncil/en/s/res/2375-
%282017%29) prohibited UN member states and territories from allowing North Koreans to do
work for them unless approved in advance by the UN Security Council’s 1718 Committee. The
U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Oce of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has the authority to
sanction or ne individuals or organizations knowingly working with North Korean organizations
or citizens, through Economic Sanctions Enforcement Guidelines, 31 C.F.R. part 501 and North
Korea Sanctions Regulations, 31 C.F.R. part 510. In short, anyone knowingly hiring or working with
a North Korean person or organization can face very sti penalties, including jail time and the
inability to work with U.S.-based companies and banks.
Note: The U.S. even oers rewards of up to $5M for information on illicit North Korean activities:
https://rewardsforjustice.net/index/?north-korea=north-korea.
KnowBe4’s North Korean Fake Employee Hire
KnowBe4 needed a principal software engineer for our growing internal IT Articial Intelligence
team. We posted the job on KnowBe4’s job website, https://www.knowbe4.com/careers and
received, as we always do, a ton of resumes. We reviewed the resumes and conducted multiple
interviews. Our nalist job candidate went through four remote Zoom-based interviews with
various internal employees, gave references, and sent us a copy of what we thought was an
ocial government identication card. We performed our normal background checks, which
at the time were more focused on looking for any past criminal acts or other traditional hiring
red ags. Wechecked references, which were very positive, and after a clear background check,
wehired them.
This is who we thought we hired. He called himself Kyle.
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Whoever was behind the fake employee persona posed as a U.S.-born citizen of Asian ancestry,
who was educated in Hong Kong and previously worked at multiple large U.S.-based companies.
We soon learned that the name and various identifying information was taken from another real
U.S. citizen without their permission. But that real U.S. person’s identity passed the previous
version of our background checks.
Note: We are not sharing the last name because we want to protect the privacy of the real U.S. citizen.
The picture above was submitted as part of the onboarding process into our corporate and
HR systems. The picture is an AI-enhanced version of the person who we interviewed during
the hiring process, where the applicant’s face was added over a completely dierent unrelated
person’s “stock photography” picture so they looked more professional with glasses and
wearing formal work attire.
After they accepted the job, we sent them a Mac workstation, which, unknown to
the receiver (or simply ignored), contained a lot of good security and monitoring
software. We also sent them a multifactor FIDO-enabled YubiKey so they
could log into our network. The new employee came up with a plausible
excuse so that we would ship the laptop to another location that was
not indicated on their resume or other submitted information. Asyou
will soon learn, this is one of the common signs of a North Korean
employee.
Every KnowBe4 employee and contractor can only access the
applications and data they need to see to perform their roles and
tasks. In nearly all instances, this is a very limited set of resources,
but more so for new hires. Newly hired employees must take a week
or more of training before being released to their team for even more
training and oversight as they begin to perform their expected duties.
New employees undergoing training basically have access to
corporate email, Zoom, and internal messaging (i.e., Slack), along with
a very restricted training system with no access to real customer data.
They do not have access to any shared, mapped drives. No condential
data is stored locally on laptops.
On July 15, 2024, at 9:55 PM EST, the day and time the employee received
and powered on the laptop, they tried (and failed multiple times) to install
password-stealing malware and manipulate session history logs. At rst, they
tried to download the malware from a USB device, and when that failed, they tried
to do the same using a server located on their local network.
The Mac’s endpoint, detection, and response (EDR) software immediately created an alert
generated by the attempted malware install. Our InfoSec security operations center (SOC) noted
the alert and, within minutes, contacted the new employee using Slack. At this time, our SOC
employee did not know we had a North Korean employee situation. They were just reaching
out to oer well-meaning help and to see if there could be a legitimate reason why unexpected
malware upload and log le change alert messages had been generated.
The person answering the Slack message came back with a strange excuse that did not match
the alerts. The remote employee oered up that the alerts were generated while they were
troubleshooting a speed issue with their local Internet router. The remote employee’s excuses
were not making sense, so the SOC employee asked them to get on an audio chat (i.e., Slack
huddle) so both sides could more easily discuss what was going on.
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The remote employee made an excuse about why they could not get on audio. They eventually
stopped communicating on Slack altogether. This immediately triggered a heightened sense
of caution in the SOC agent. Within a few minutes, in consultation with other senior InfoSec
employees, it was decided to fully isolate the system from our network while logs and additional
surveillance information were collected. The laptop was locked down around 10:20 PM EST, 25
minutes from the rst alert.
Additional KnowBe4 InfoSec employees were brought in, and they shared the collected data with
others at Mandiant, a leading global cybersecurity expert, and the FBI, to corroborate our initial
ndings. In a short period of time, it was denitively determined that this case had all the signs
of a North Korean fake employee scam. We collected as much information as we could remotely
from the laptop. We learned a lot about what had been attempted on the laptop as well as useful
network information.
We learned that a device
running the Raspberry Pi OS
was setup to remotely access our
laptop as a KVM (Keyboard, Video,
Mouse) device, so that the remote
North Korean employee and
their helpers could access the
laptop without alerting our
SOC to the presence of a strange,
unexpected TCP/IP port trac
that a normal remote access
application (e.g., Microsoft
Remote Desktop Protocol, Virtual
Network Computing, SSH, etc.) would create. No customer or
condential data was viewed, compromised, or exltrated from
any KnowBe4 service or system.
We eventually came into contact with other security consultants
who were well aware of the North Korean fake employee
schemes. Out of an abundance of caution, we decided to
involve the FBI. The FBI thanked us for our call and cooperation.
Theysaid they were aware of many more cases involving North
Korean fake employees, but most victim organizations do not
report it or cooperate.
We told our new “employee” that they were being red for
violations of company policy (e.g., not wanting to get on camera,
unauthorized software installs, etc.) and asked them to send
back our laptop. To our surprise, they sent the laptop back, and we turned it over to the FBI.
Later on, we learned that other companies who requested their equipment back also got their
equipment back. We can only guess the involved perpetrator(s) does not want an additional
felony for a stolen equipment charge added to their list of illegalities.
Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of KnowBe4, was made aware of the situation. Once the relevant facts
were known and conrmed, Stu (as he is known to everyone), decided to let all employees know
what happened. A few days later, at our daily employee meeting, Stu shared what had happened.
Another few days later, on July 23, 2024, KnowBe4 publicly released information about how a
North Korean “fake employee” was accidentally hired and detected (https://blog.knowbe4.com/
how-a-north-korean-fake-it-worker-tried-to-inltrate-us).
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Note: Stu is an unusually transparent CEO. He frequently publicly shares things that most other
CEOs would not, like when he had failed a simulated phishing test or that time when he clicked
on a real phish (and quickly reported it). People who know Stu or KnowBe4 were not surprised
when we shared our latest experience, even though it meant sharing with the world that we had a
previous gap in our hiring processes.
Although we did get some early negative feedback from a few critics, the vast majority of
responses were overwhelmingly positive. Many people thanked us for being among the rst
companies to share our North Korean fake employee experience. We got an enormous response
to our blog article and dozens of media sources wrote to share our story. Some of the media
sources got some of the facts wrong and we subsequently wrote a few more clarifying articles,
including these:
https://blog.knowbe4.com/north-korean-fake-it-worker-faq
https://blog.knowbe4.com/how-the-whole-world-now-knows-about-fake-north-korean-it-workers
There is a common long-time complaint in the cybersecurity industry that organizations often
do not publicly share when they have been exploited unless required by law, and even then,
they often do not include enough useful details to allow other organizations to better protect
themselves. This is often because victim companies, rightfully, worry about potential legal
consequences of admitting they had a security gap and because they worry about resulting
negative publicity or customer responses.
After hearing from many other organizations who had also hired (or almost hired) North Korean
fake employees, but had not publicly shared the information, we decided we needed to tell other
organizations how to recognize the signs of North Korean fake employees and give suggestions
for updating hiring processes. To that end, we created this free whitepaper, created two public
webinars, and released more related articles.
If our experience helps other organizations to avoid hiring North Korean fake employees, then we
have accomplished our objectives.
BACKGROUND ON NORTH KOREAN FAKE EMPLOYEES
One of the most important points to understand about the North Korean fake employees’
scheme is that it is known about, developed, approved, and directed at the highest levels of the
DPRK regime, including by DPRK leader Kim Jong Un. The North Korean fake employees’ program,
often known as the ‘DPRK IT workers’ in other industry literature, provides a large egress of
revenue to North Korea, and in particular to its sanctioned weapons development program, which
includes nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
North Korea understands the importance that IT and online cyber activities and services play in
today’s world and in the future success of North Korea. To that end, North Korea has established
many schools and universities dedicated to IT skills and cybersecurity. Many of the most
promising IT graduates, especially developers with good English-speaking skills, are siphoned o
into the North Korean fake employee program.
There are likely thousands of North Koreans involved in the program, both within North Korea and
elsewhere. North Korean fake employees are often located outside of North Korea for a bunch of
reasons, including the fact that North Korea’s Internet IP address space is very limited and known.
If North Korea was using Internet access from within North Korea to perform the fake worker
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program, it would require more hiding and re-routing or it would be more easily spotted and
blocked. On top of that, North Korea has spotty Internet access, frequent power interruptions, and
other infrastructure issues that would make such a program harder to accomplish.
Because of these internal infrastructure challenges, North Koreans involved in the fake employee
scheme are often located in foreign countries and continents, such as China, Malaysia, Russia,
Africa, and other countries in Southeast Asia. China seems to be the most common origination
location, likely due to the strong Internet and energy infrastructure, cheaper operating costs,
and somewhat similar diets and cultures. Most of the money earned by the North Korean fake
employee program is sent back to the North Korean government.
Evolution
It appears that the North Korean fake employee program rst evolved from one where they
mostly concentrated on gaining “freelancing” work projects on general freelance work websites,
such as Fiverr, and from successfully competing for temporary remote work (i.e., contract
workers) for companies around the world. This occurred during a time when there was an
explosion in the need for more IT workers and developers around the world.
North Korean fake employee work is mostly centered around software and application
development work and, to a lesser extent, graphic design. North Korean fake employees
often have strong development skills, especially in much sought-after “backend” work, such as
interfaces and APIs (application programming interfaces), and in new technologies such as cloud
development, cryptocurrencies, and articial intelligence (AI).
Developers of all kinds, legitimate and
otherwise, began to “advertise” their
skills and previous work on social media
and developer sites, such as LinkedIn
and GitHub. It is very common for
today’s developers to send these links
to potential employers along with their
resumes, who can look at those sites
to see what type of work the employee
candidate has done in the past. North Korean fake employees learned how to create simple,
but realistic-looking (and fraudulent) resumes and website presences. These fake resumes and
websites use fake or stolen identities.
The COVID-19 epidemic (2019 – 2022) accelerated work-from-home (WFH) scenarios where an
increasing percentage of employees could work completely remote, often never being required
to show up at a physical work location. Today, it is very normal for employers to hire employees
without ever having met them or expecting them to meet physically, in person, with anyone in
the organization. This is especially true for developer positions. Employers who require that their
developers work in the oce or in a “hybrid” situation of some in-oce days will be cut out of a
signicant portion of potential employees.
North Korea took advantage of the new WFH jobs being oered throughout the world, moving
from mostly freelance work to more full-time positions. North Korean fake employees try to
remain employed as long as possible, even though a signicant portion are terminated quite
quickly due to their discovery of being fake employees or simply poor work performance.
Depending on the country and company where the fake employee was working, it can take weeks
to months to re them once someone suspects they are fake. And during this time, they are
collecting revenue for North Korea.
North Korea took advantage of the new
WFH jobs being oered throughout the
world, moving from mostly freelance
work to more full-time positions.
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Growing Warnings and Other Sources
Even before our personal experience, we were already generally aware of the North Korean fake
employee schemes. We even wrote about it here (https://blog.knowbe4.com/fbi-warns-of-north-
korean-social-engineering) on October 25, 2023. At the time, we didn’t realize the scope, scale,
and sophistication of the North Korean fake employee scheme. Most companies did not.
Until fairly recently, the North Koreans mainly pursued positions in cryptocurrency rms,
mega-corporations, and freelance work. We also knew our background checks would catch any
synthetic (i.e., fake) identities, which were usually created and used in these schemes. North
Korean fake employees were notorious for not wanting to be on camera during interviews. We
did not count on them using a stolen real U.S. identity, gladly submitting to multiple on-camera
interviews, creating AI-enabled pictures, and using fake IDs when needed at physical locations.
How North Korean fake employees operate has changed over time, working to bypass previous
successful verication checks, expanding operations, targeting organizations of every type and
size, and in their boldness. This is documented over time by government reports and media
articles detailing their increasing sophistication and spread.
On May 16, 2022, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a 16-page detailed report entitled, GUIDANCE
ON THE DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY WORKERS
(https://ofac.treasury.gov/media/923126/download). This report contained tons of details and
should be read by anyone interested in this topic. But at the time, because of what North Korean
fake employees were mostly doing, the report warned U.S. employers to be aware not to hire fake
“freelancers.” There was not a huge focus on warning U.S. employers against hiring fake, full-time
employees.
As great as the May 2022 report was, it
did not receive a lot of media attention
at the time. It got lost in all the other
reports and articles regarding all kinds
of fake employers and fake employees
(covered below), popping up during the
same period of time.
Nearly another year and a half went
by before Mandiant briey mentioned
some signs of North Korean fake
employees in a long blog article about
all sorts of sophisticated North Korean threats on October 10, 2023 (https://cloud.google.com/
blog/topics/threat-intelligence/north-korea-cyber-structure-alignment-2023/). In the article,
Mandiant wrote, “…several of the documents focused on resumes, CVs and references, which may
be leveraged to apply to various job openings…”
A week later, on October 18, 2023, the FBI updated (https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2023/
PSA231018) their previous report from May 2022, this time indicating that North Korean fake
employee “tradecraft” had evolved to fake full-time employees. This announcement did catch
the media’s attention, including the KnowBe4 post mentioned above on October 25th. We wrote
about the North Korean threat again on December 13, 2023 (https://blog.knowbe4.com/north-
korean-operatives-inltrate-job-platforms) based on a new report from Nisos (https://www.nisos.
com/research/dprk-it-worker-scam/).
How North Korean fake employees
operate has changed over time, working
to bypass previous successful verication
checks, expanding operations, targeting
organizations of every type and size,
andin their boldness.
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Mandiant started to be involved in more and more cases of North Korean fake employees.
Mandiant Principal Analyst, Michael Barnhart, joined The Defender’s Advantage podcast (https://
open.spotify.com/episode/0xeaavXjlX2XLm3oibOv6g) on February 21st, 2024, to talk about the
problem.
By May 2024, the problem was becoming more well-known outside of cybersecurity circles.
The Wall Street Journal revealed (https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/american-it-
scammer-helped-north-korea-fund-nuclear-weapons-program-u-s-says-65430aa7) that over 300
U.S. companies had hired North Korean fake employees and revealed that Americans and other
foreign nationals were assisting them. On June 7, 2024, the Wall Street Journal published another
related article entitled, “Deepfakes, Fraudsters and Hackers Are Coming for Cybersecurity Jobs”
(https://www.wsj.com/articles/deepfakes-fraudsters-and-hackers-are-coming-for-cybersecurity-
jobs-e2a76d06).
What was often missing in the media reports was an abundance of details of what the fake
employee candidate did during the interview process to fool unsuspecting rms. While dierent
types of organizations were sometimes mentioned (e.g., a major television network, an aerospace
and defense company, a car manufacturer, etc.), the focus again was often on mega-corporations
hiring freelancers and did not mention that smaller companies…sometimes very small
companies…were also being targeted. They did not mention people getting on camera. It is more
dicult to defend when the relevant details and recommended defenses are not being readily
shared. And until recently, none of the news stories went “viral” and really gained worldwide
traction. Most organizations were unaware of the scale and sophistication of the North Korean
fake employee problem.
That changed with our July 23, 2024 blog post. We publicly shared details, pictures, security gaps,
and suggested defenses. And it worked. There were dozens of news articles the next day, and
now more companies feel comfortable publicly sharing their own North Korean fake employee
experiences.
You can use background services that will conrm whether or not the employee you are thinking
of hiring is or is not a North Korean fake employee. There is a smattering of free tools anyone
can use to do some Open Source Intelligence (OSInt) investigations on their own, including
https://github.com/shortdoom/gh-fake-analyzer/tree/main#malicious-github-accounts.
Individuals are even sharing (https://github.com/shortdoom/gh-fake-analyzer/blob/main/proles/
INVESTIGATIONS/ZachXBT_15.08.2024/Attackers.jpeg) names, email addresses, and IDs of proven
North Korean fake employees. North Korean fake employees often have many jobs at dierent
organizations using the same fake or stolen ID, so knowing the names of the conrmed fake
employees can help organizations avoid being duped.
Note: It would be extremely helpful if a government’s website had a “global list” of all conrmed
North Korean fake employee names and ID information where they all could be easily shared or
queried by anyone.
The U.S. Department of Justice has announced several separate charges and arrests of U.S.
citizens and other foreign nationals who are helping the North Koreans with their fake employee
schemes, including an Arizona woman and Ukrainian man here (https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/
pr/charges-and-seizures-brought-fraud-scheme-aimed-denying-revenue-workers-associated-
north) and a Tennessee man here (https://cyberscoop.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/08/
FILED-INDICTMENT-Knoot.pdf).
It is our hope that more and more organizations will share their experiences with North Korean
fake employees, and really, any exploitation, so that we can all learn together and better protect
ourselves.
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General Infrastructure
There are four general parts to the North Korean fake employee scheme:
•
North Korean-based program leaders
•
North Korean employees and managers based in other countries
•
Non-Korean scheme assisters (usually based in the country where the job is located)
•
Infrastructure to assist with accepting payments, generating fake identities or stealing real
identities, creating fake employee websites and projects, giving references, money laundering,
document forgery services, etc.
The North Korean fake employees are often skilled IT workers and developers trained at North
Korean universities. They are usually located in foreign countries, such as China, in shared
apartments (living spaces) and workspaces. The daily work is usually performed in a room that
looks like a busy call center. In fact, many of the potential employers noted the noisy background
any time they interviewed the employee candidate.
Most of the money earned by the North Korean fake employees is sent back to the North
Korean government. The local manager (or minder) takes a small portion of the proceeds rst
for themselves and operations before remitting the rest back to North Korea. The North Korean
employee gets very little of the earned revenue. It is believed that their close family members are
always kept back in North Korea to be used as personal leverage to force the employee to toil long
hours for very little wages. Several sources have concluded that North Korean fake employees are
considered to be “human-tracked”.
There is a large criminal ecosystem of support services that assist the North Koreans with their
fake employee schemes. The North Korean fake employees will use fake, stolen, or purchased
identities. Stolen or purchased identities will often be from the country being targeted.
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North Korean fake employees often create or obtain fake “ocial” documents when requested by
the employer. According to the FBI (https://ofac.treasury.gov/media/923126/download), previously
submitted forged documents have included:
•
Driver’s licenses
•
Social Security cards
•
Passports
•
National identication cards
•
Resident foreigner cards
•
High school and university diplomas
•
Work visas
•
Credit card, bank, and utility statements
Stolen or purchased identities are preferred because they more easily meet the job requirements
and pass background and other checks. In some cases, the owners of the real identity have been
paid to assist in the scheme, participating in interviews, picking up equipment, and taking drug
tests. Other times, it is other unrelated individuals pretending to be the other identity, often using
fraudulently created, ocial-looking IDs.
As documented in several judicial proceedings (including here: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/
pr/charges-and-seizures-brought-fraud-scheme-aimed-denying-revenue-workers-associated-
north), there are many services and websites worldwide which, knowingly or unknowingly provide
stolen identities to the North Koreans. Some reports have described services and websites (and
Discord servers), which oer U.S. citizens a chance to earn money by being part of the scheme.
It appears that sometimes the involved citizens think they are helping foreigners get jobs they
would otherwise be “discriminated against” obtaining. And in other cases, they do know they are
involved in helping North Koreans bypass sanctions.
Laptop Farms
There are usually citizens in the same country as the job position to accept equipment mailed by
the employer. They often set up the equipment in their homes and other locations so that the
remote North Koreans (or their hired contractors) can access the equipment. One “laptop farm”
was found with over 90 dierent laptops from various employers. Several employers receiving
the equipment back after ring the fake employee have reported that the laptop lid contained a
yellow “sticky note” with the name of their organization inked on it. It is obvious that the laptop
farm employee was labeling the equipment to keep track of which laptop belonged to which
organization.
North Koreans, after learning they have been accepted for a new position, almost always tell the
employer to ship the laptop and other equipment to another location not previously disclosed
on their resume or other systems. This is a very common sign of a North Korean fake employee.
Theycome up with various fake excuses, such as new permanent living locations, helping out a
sick relative, and traveling with a girlfriend. Regardless of the excuse, the new location to which
they ask for the equipment to be mailed is usually unknown and a surprise to the employer.
This is likely because the North Korean employee is involved in dozens to hundreds of ongoing
fake employment schemes, and when accepted for new employment, now has to direct the
employer’s equipment to a valid local country equipment farm. These laptop farm managers do
quit and get arrested, so the North Koreans are using a forever-changing list of laptop farmers.
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Note: It is likely that in the future, because this tactic has been publicly revealed, the mailing location
the laptop is shipped to will be used early and consistently in the job application process. This and other
current signs of a North Korean fake employee may change as the North Koreans respond to publicly
revealed tactics and successful defender mitigations.
The equipment handlers often have fake IDs in the name of the fake hired employee, but with
their picture inserted for the visual review. Employers shipping equipment to remote employees
should ensure that the person picking up the equipment visually and informationally matches the
person who participated in the previous hiring processes. The North Koreans rely on the fact that
most of the legitimate services involved in checking IDs are not comparing the IDs they receive
with each other, for if they did, they would see distinct dierences in most cases (except where a
single fake employee is participating in all aspects of the scheme).
There are North Korean fake employee schemes where a country’s citizen is thoroughly involved
in the employment scam, from using a real resume, participating in the interviews, taking drug
tests, picking up the equipment, etc., and then turning over the resulting work and the rest of the
interfacing to the remote North Korean worker (or the contractor they hired).
North Korean fake employees will often turn over the resulting work to other foreign and
domestic contractors. They will either let the contractor take over part or all aspects of the fake
employee scheme and earn a percentage of the paid salary. Some employers have noted that the
person they thought they hired was not the person doing the work, either in physical looks, voice/
accent, or the related knowledge and/or quality of work delivered. Other times, the North Korean
fake employee does all the work except pick up the corporate equipment.
There is often an entire ecosystem of supporting criminal services and people involved. The
services include fraudulent identity services, fake banks, money laundering, cryptocurrency
services, cryptocurrency exchanges and “mixers”, “mules”, laptop farmers, subcontractors,
resume writers, social media and GitHub account creators, developers, job nders, fake ID
creators, VPN services, VOIP services, etc. Those involved often know that what is being done is
illegal or unethical, but may or may not know that North Korea is involved.
It can be assumed that North Korean employees within the same managed group, and possibly
at larger levels, share what tactics do and do not work. They likely share what caused failures,
how to possibly bypass them, and what ecosystem services made their jobs easier and more
successful.
They likely use dierent techniques for dierent scenarios,
depending on what types of defenses they have to
overcome.
The North Koreans largely depend on employers
not being aware of the threat and not implementing
defenses that can detect and prevent them. The
revenue earned by North Korean fake employees
results in hundreds of millions to billions of dollars
reaching the North Korean government, much of
which is used to fund their sanctioned weapons
programs.
12
Inbound/Outbound Strategies
Many organizations report “inbound” contact with North Korean fake employees, where the
North Korean employee reached out to the employer about a possible job. That contact was
initiated from a job oered on the employer’s website or from a legitimate job’s website. In a few
cases, the North Korean fake employee reached out to a developer manager on social media (e.g.,
LinkedIn, etc.) and inquired if any jobs were available.
In many other cases, the employer reached out (i.e., outbound) to the North Korean fake
employee, not knowing they were North Koreans or fake proles. In most of these cases, the
North Koreans hosted basic, but credible proles on social media, GitHub, or other seeking jobs
websites. In some cases, the employer actively looked for potential employees on LinkedIn and
came across fake proles.
Recruiters often played a big role in both inbound and outbound contacts with North Korean fake
employees. Many employers were brought the North Korean fake employee by a trusted recruiter
who had previously, unknowingly, been duped. Every recently interviewed recruiter reported a
very large, serious problem in the recruitment industry from North Korean fake employees.
Many employers reported both multiple inbound and outbound contacts with North Korean
fake employees over the last year, but only now, knowing the signs to look for, realized they were
North Korean fake employees.
Fake remote employees and contractors are now something every organization needs to worry
about. Every organization should be updating its hiring policies and training to reect this new
reality. While the news is all about fake North Korean employees, really it
could be from any country and really any person wishing to pretend to be
someone else.
At the very least, every organization should have processes in place to
conrm the identity of the person they intend to hire really is that
person, whether that is meeting them in person along with their
government-issued ID or using trusted agents, such as background
searching rms, which include relevant checks. You even need to
ensure the remote person you hired is still the one working for you, as
many remote employee scams have involved bait-and-switch schemes.
Other Fake Employers and Fake Employees
Readers should understand that fake employers and fake
employees abound and are not just a problem created and
solely operated by North Korea. For over a decade, the
cybersecurity industry has noted a ra of fake employers
and fake employees (including from North Korea), and
KnowBe4 has written about it many times, including here:
https://blog.knowbe4.com/fbi-scammers-exploit-job-
posting-sites-with-fake-jobs-to-steal-money-and-
personal-information
https://www.securityinfowatch.com/security-
executives/article/53079753/the-dilemma-of-fake-job-
scams-is-hard-to-stop-at-scale
13
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-stop-job-scams-roger-grimes
https://blog.knowbe4.com/job-seekers-and-employers-beware
https://blog.knowbe4.com/north-korean-threat-actors-target-software-developers
https://blog.knowbe4.com/heads-up-north-korean-cybercriminals-use-fake-recruitment-emails-
in-phishing-scam
https://blog.knowbe4.com/how-nks-cyber-criminals-stole-3-billion-in-crypto-to-fund-their-nukes
The FBI has warned about fake employers looking to harm individuals many times in the past,
including here:
https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2024/PSA240604
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/eld-oces/elpaso/news/press-releases/fbi-warns-cyber-
criminals-are-using-fake-job-listings-to-target-applicants-personally-identiable-information
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/eld-oces/newhaven/news/press-releases/fbi-new-haven-
warning-college-students-of-employment-scams
It should be noted that many fake jobs are advertised
on legitimate job websites. The North Koreans and
others fool legitimate job sites into posting fake
job ads, which often add an air of legitimacy
to the posted job. Certainly, anyone not
suspecting that a potential advertised job
is fake is at far greater risk of falling for the
employment scheme. The legitimate job
websites often look for and weed out fake
employment ads, but it is often a losing
game of cat-and-mouse.
Many countries, including Iran, south Asian
countries, and Russia, seem to have many
sophisticated groups dedicated to pretending to
be fake employers and employees. Fake employers
are also very problematic. These fake employers
often target already working employees, hoping to steal
something of monetary value from the victim (by making them pay fake pre-employment fees
or purchase and ship expensive equipment to get the job) or to target their existing employer.
Employees have been compromised, so the attacker could gain access to the employer to spread
malware, ransomware, steal money, or obtain condential information.
One of the most infamous cases is where a fake LinkedIn job ad enticed an existing employee of a
cryptocurrency rm to apply for the fake job and ended up resulting in his current employer being
robbed of $500M in cryptocurrency: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/277721/20220706/
axie-innity-hacked-500m-lost-via-fake-linkedin-job-listing.htm. The culprit in this case was the
Lazurus group, a well-known North Korean nation-state hacking group.
Your hiring process should include mitigations to prevent all sorts of fake employees.
Allemployees in the hiring process should be educated about fake employees. All employees
should be educated about fake employer scams too, as they can result in personal harm and
harm to the organization.
14
Intentions
The U.S. government has repeatedly stated that the main intention of the North Korean fake
employee program is to provide illegal revenue to North Korea through the receiving of work
payments, such as salaries and other contractual payments. The vast majority of reviewed
information from involved activity logs and interactions shows that most of the time, the fake
employee simply performed the type of work they were hired to do and thus earned continued
compensation. In other instances, they did not perform the required work (or performed it poorly
or rarely), but did not perform other malicious or espionage activities. The main intent of the
North Korean fake employee program seems to be to collect continued revenue over extended
periods of time, often then used for the sanctioned North Korean weapons programs.
At the same time, there are many conrmed instances in which the inltration of North Korean
fake employees also led to monetary theft by other means, such as stolen cryptocurrency or
malicious corporate bank transfers. There have been many cases involving the exltration of
condential information, intellectual property, and project secrets. There have also been cases
of malicious code intentionally inserted in the software projects in which the North Korean fake
employees were involved.
It is believed that many of these instances are cases where the involved handlers recognized the
signicance of the compromise in regard to the larger interests of North Korea and in some cases,
specic organizations and industries were likely intentionally targeted with specic espionage
goals in mind.
In the absence of information to the contrary, any exltrated company should assume that goals
beyond revenue may be involved. With that being said, the vast majority of investigated cases
had the main intent of earning revenue through work eorts. Potential victims should install and
manage strong monitoring systems on involved endpoints to be able to collect data to prove
intent and detect all worker actions, if needed, during a potential compromise.
The rest of this whitepaper is the real meat, covering the signs of a North Korean fake employee
and how employers should update their hiring processes to protect their organization.
SIGNS OF A NORTH KOREAN FAKE EMPLOYEE
Here are some of the common signs of a North Korean fake employee:
During the Hiring Process
•
Presents themselves as Asian (e.g., South Korean, Chinese, Malaysian, Japanese, etc.),
European, or U.S.-based
•
Will often claim to have always lived in the U.S., to have only gone to U.S.-based universities,
and worked for well-known U.S.-based companies, even though their English is limited
•
Will often claim to be a U.S.-based citizen with an American/English-sounding name, but will
have a very heavy accent
•
If you are familiar with Asian accents, the accent will often not be from the claimed country or
region (will often be a North Korean accent)
•
Will often use a fake identity that will fail if checked
•
Will often submit a fake ID credential that will fail if checked
•
Will often claim a fake work history that will fail if checked
15
•
Supplied personal websites, proles, or GitHub sites seem overly basic, often saying
something and nothing at the same time or you can nd very similar sites and proles
•
Often claimed prior work product can be tied to other names
•
Sites and proles are relatively new or match the date when various “former” work products
were created/posted
•
Claimed identity has zero Internet presence or history outside of supplied sites and proles
•
Conicting inconsistent information provided between resumes, social media sites, proles, in
interviews, and how they answer questions or what they select or input on HR hiring systems
(such as marital status, address, etc.)
•
All connections are made using VPNs
•
Candidate will participate in interviews from a noisy (call center-like) background
•
All phone numbers submitted (candidate and reference) will be virtual voice-over-IP (VoIP)
numbers (which can be checked online)
•
Candidate and reference email addresses will always be email addresses from commonly used
public email domains (e.g., Gmail.com, Hotmail.com, Outlook.com, etc.)
•
Reference phone numbers and email addresses will never be to legitimate business phone
numbers or email domains of the claimed business
•
May be hesitant coming on camera for one or more interviews, may make excuses for why
camera is not working
After Hiring
•
Wants you to mail organization devices to an additional location not indicated on the
employment application or in previous communications
•
You detect unnecessary remote login on the organization’s device
•
IP address where the organizational device is logging in from does not match the
claimed location
•
You detect malware on the organizational device
•
You detect unusual behavior on the organizational device
•
Changes to log les or other cover-up attempts on the organizational device
•
Work hours do not seem consistent with the country or region being claimed, emails and work
product seem always to be delivered during very late night hours
•
Minor misspellings on things they should not be misspelling (like their name, address, etc.)
•
Frequently changing email addresses (because they have been detected and shutdown on the
old email address)
•
Inconsistent project delivery quality, denitely does not seem to meet the quality of person
interviewed
•
Inability to get them on camera or inability to get timely responses from online channels,
especially during hours that would be sleeping time for them
•
Unusual/strange payment scheme requests, especially using virtual currency
•
If they request that work payment be sent to a bank, banking details provided for payment are
to a strange-looking bank or do not match public records
•
They request that payments be made to virtual currency, cryptocurrency, or other popular
money exchange sites (e.g., PayPal, Venmo, etc.)
•
Employee changes OS or application to Korean language support even though the claim to be
of another nationality
16
An employee candidate does not need to match all these common signs to be a fake employee.
But it is good to create checks for each of these and if any candidate being considered as a nalist
meets even some of these signs, they should be further scrutinized and reviewed for accuracy
before continuing. Most employers who eventually detected a North Korean fake employee or
resume, when checking past submissions, found additional likely North Korean fake employee
candidates (who had not made it through the normal hiring process to become a nalist).
HOW TO PROTECT YOUR ORGANIZATION
Fake employees, North Korean and otherwise, are a serious threat to every employer, especially
those with remote-only positions. Every at-risk organization should educate all employees
who could be involved in the hiring process about the risk and consider following the various
mitigations listed below:
During Hiring Process
•
Share the risk with senior management, if they are not already aware, and obtain senior
management support
•
Threat model your hiring process
•
Update your hiring process to mitigate the risk of hiring fake employees
•
Share the signs of potentially fake employees with those in the hiring process
•
Run existing remote-only employees through a process to ensure that you do not have an
existing fake employee
•
If possible, always require that remote employees physically meet with an employee, team
leader, or selected agent of the organization in person, with an ocial ID, to conrm they are
who they say they are
•
If not already existing, create a rule that all employee candidates and employees must always
be on camera during remote sessions (e.g., Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc.)
•
Keep a record of all interactions and videos of the interview process
•
If possible and reasonable, and if the employee candidate has a non-domestic accent, have a
trusted person who is familiar with accents from the same region participate in a meeting to
assess the validity of the claimed accent
•
Check for VoIP phone number use from employee candidates and references
•
Check references
•
Require that all professional/work references be made to legitimate and publicly conrmable
business phone numbers and email addresses (do not allow generic public email
addresses only)
•
Use a background check that looks for fake employees
•
Require that candidate use the same ID when presented to anyone in the hiring process
and make sure additional identity veriers in the process get a copy of the rst submitted
identication
•
Ask the candidate to submit ngerprints for identity verication purposes
17
Optional: This last suggestion is not really that conclusive, but several people in the hiring
process who ended up detecting a North Korean fake employee used this type of questioning
to determine if the employee candidate was really who they said they were when they were
becoming suspicious. If skeptical, ask a question that the candidate should easily know if being
honest, but it is not super easy to quickly look up the answer. For example:
•
If the employee candidate said they went to Virginia Tech, ask them, “What is a Hokie” or
“What’s that song that the football team always enters the stadium to?”
•
If the employee candidate states they worked for a particular employer one of the reviewers
also worked for, ask a question that anyone who worked for that employer should readily
know. For example, “You worked for Microsoft; what color badge did you have?” Any real
Microsoft employee would easily tell you the right color for the employee type.
•
“What was the name of that mascot for the baseball team?”
•
“What score did you score on your SATs?”
•
“What was the name of that huge student information center located on campus?”
•
“What was the name of that bar located next to campus that everyone went to?”
•
“What was the name of that main road running right in front of the campus?”
•
“What food is considered the primary food eaten at baseball games?”
•
“Do you have an HOA where you live?”
•
“Did you have to register for Selective Service?”
•
“At what age did they allow you to get a driver’s permit (in that state)?”
•
“Oh, I see you worked at Autodesk. What type of internal instant messaging system did they
use, again?”
Realistically, if you are becoming that skeptical during the interview process, perhaps they should
not be considered as a nalist for that position.
After Hiring
•
Lock down any supplied device to the bare minimum access needed, especially during the
initial hiring period
•
Monitor device for unusual activity, malware, unexpected language changes, or log
modications
•
Look for signs of unexpected remote logins
•
Consider asking them the same technical questions you asked during the hiring process to see
if their answers match what they gave during the interview
•
Monitor activity against purported normal work hours
•
Require employee to be on camera during training or any time when communicating with
another employee
•
Randomly ask the employee to come on camera a few times, at least during the initial
employment period
Note: The FBI encourages U.S. companies to report fake employees to their local FBI eld oce.
18
SUMMARY
Fake remote employees and contractors are now something everyone needs to worry about.
Every organization should be updating its hiring policies, processes, and education to reect this
new reality.
While the recent news is all about fake North Korean employees, really it could be from any
country and really any person wishing to pretend to be someone else. At the very least, every
organization should have processes in place to conrm the identity of the person they intend to
hire is really that person, whether that is meeting them in person along with their government-
issued ID or using trusted agents, such as background searching rms which include relevant
checks. You even need to ensure the person you hired is still the one who is working for you, as
many employee scams have involved bait-and-switch schemes.
We used to live in a world where we did not have to worry about fake employees or employers.
But times have changed and hiring processes and employees seeking new jobs need to act
accordingly.
19
KnowBe4, Inc. | 33 N Garden Ave, Suite 1200, Clearwater, FL 33755
Tel: 855-KNOWBE4 (566-9234) | www.KnowBe4.com | Email: Sales@KnowBe4.com
© 2024 KnowBe4, Inc. All rights reserved. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be
trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
01E09K01
Additional Resources
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About KnowBe4
KnowBe4, the provider of the world’s largest security
awareness training and simulated phishing platform,
is used by more than 70,000 organizations around the
globe. Founded by IT and data security specialist Stu
Sjouwerman, KnowBe4 helps organizations address the
human element of security by raising awareness about
ransomware, CEO fraud and other social engineering
tactics through a new-school approach to awareness
training on security.
The late Kevin Mitnick, who was an internationally
recognized cybersecurity specialist and KnowBe4’s Chief
Hacking Ocer, helped design the KnowBe4 training
based on his well-documented social engineering tactics.
Tens of thousands of organizations rely on KnowBe4 to
mobilize their end users as their last line of defense and
trust the KnowBe4 platform to strengthen their security
culture and reduce human risk.
For more information, please visit www.KnowBe4.com
