On the surface it seems the "security" industry is lacking in the most basic of security processes when hiring.
I don't think I've ever worked anywhere that could accidentally hire a North Korean without uncovering it somewhere in the hiring process, and all my jobs have been especially uninteresting.
What bothers me more is there are talented people sitting on unemployment right now that can't find a job, yet fake people are getting hired left and right. Something in the industry as a whole is quite broken.
They found this person at the top of the funnel, before they even started the process, and then chose to go through with it out of curiosity / for advertising. I personally think it's silly (I don't think the advertising or learning about some comically basic TTP like "interview coaching" was worth their team's time) but it's not a lack of basic process in this case.
I will say that hiring for remote jobs has gotten to be a gigantic time waste lately. Even though even moderate background checking can filter these candidates out, it's quite time consuming and with the rise of generative AI, these type of candidates (whether state-sponsored malicious actors or overemployment shops) are appearing in every industry and every role constantly by the hundreds. I disagree completely with other posts claiming only crypto and finance are being targeted; while it's hard to confirm and the North Korean operation specifically may be more tailored, fake candidates are rampant throughout the tech industry now.
Not sure why this would be any different for remote jobs. All job interview processes (remote and in-office) I've ever done have had an in-person step, and that should be enough to filter these fake candidates, no? Are companies really doing 100% remote interviews, as in: you sign the offer letter without even meeting a single person in person??
Also, the in-person step is usually at the end, which means yes, you can waste a lot of time phone- and Zoom-chatting with fake candidates, but that is equally true for in-office vs. remote roles. Nobody starts with the in-person, on-site interview.
I can definitely confirm it’s not just finance and crypto being targeted.
I can also confirm it’s not just state sponsored North Korean agents too. Sometimes it’s just individuals trying to fake it until they make it.
However I dont agree with your conclusion that remote interviews are not dead because of this. Yes it’s annoying and time consuming filtering out these culprits, but the interview process already was an annoying and time consuming process to begin with. So I wouldn’t be so quick to throw the baby out with the bath water.
I will say that hiring for remote jobs has gotten to be a gigantic time waste lately. Even though even moderate background checking can filter these candidates out, it's quite time consuming and with the rise of generative AI...
Firm that looks like it is hiring for remote jobs, but is actually a honeypot that harvests credentials and identifiers that will enable our clients tondetect scam applicants.
Hate to be that person, but what are you reading that makes you think this is true?
Agree that the article is pretty dumb though, especially the OSINT and Crypto “don’t trust, verify” comments. Feels like content marketing that didn’t really hit.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/29/north_korea_worker_in...
According to Crowdstrike (the company that wiped out most of global technology last year) at least
> My favorite interview question, because we've interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly
It's really, really bad. We post a role, get 500 applicants, and nearly all of them are not legitimate. They all look amazing, really great resume, impressive LinkedIn, etc... but when you dig a little deeper, it's not that hard to find a bunch of red flags (LinkedIn profile create < 3 months ago, VOIP number, using VPN to submit job application, etc). You really have to know what signs to look for. They're very convincing fakes.
We're extremely vigilant about this issue as a company, yet we've had people get through 2 or 3 rounds before someone realized something was off (some people are really, really good at faking it).
I feel bad for small companies trying to hire. For us, it got to the point where we literally couldn't open a role unless we had a full time recruiter to sift through all the international candidates pretending to live in the US.
Edit: We've been dealing with this for a couple years now, and there still isn't a great solution. Unfortunately the only surefire "solutions" we can think of are also things that would make the interview process less enjoyable for real candidates, which sucks. (One idea was to ask candidates to show us photo ID during the video interview, but something about making a candidate do that just doesn't feel good - although we have tried it, and it has effectively stopped a few fake people from getting through)
Then next year it's a different guy, same schtick.
I worked at an adtech company, he would give talks with powerpoints talking about internet of things which was absolutely wild. (We never sold or touched a single piece of hardware.)
This isn’t happening left and right. It’s an attack against specific industries, like crypto and finance. It’s one part of a broader pattern of attacks.
An entire country has dedicated significant resources to getting some of their hackers hired. Those talented people you mention are likely trying to get hired by themselves. It’s not an industry problem so much as a coordinated attack.
Because I got no explanation the potential reasons for my rejection rolled over in my head. I finished the exam to the best of my ability - was my ability just not good enough? If I went to e.g. the library or something to hunt for a station with webcams in time would I have not come off so suspect?
Since then I've gotten no other interview offers elsewhere and feel like a moron for blowing my one chance last month over such a stupid coincidence, if it really was the case they rejected me for thinking I was some kind of corporate spy. It really was the definition of "too good to be true." I will now pay way more attention to how I appear to the interviewer from now on, and carry extra devices/webcams in case the worst happens.
It seems like there's a very WIDE range of quality people / companies, and an awful lot of compete FRAUDS.
For whatever reason "security" seems to have attracted a lot of carpetbaggers.
The good folks are very sensitive about it.
Nothing gives someone away as a poser as much as bragging about OSINT as if it's some sort of tradecraft meanwhile they're executing the same skills your average wine aunt does stalking her ex-boyfriend on Facebook.
It IS "broken" by design as employers just don't want to go through the effort into finding great candidates (even if they are truly exceptional) and now it is even easier for candidates to cheat it thanks to AI.
The ones claiming to "fix" it aren't fixing anything and are making it worse for both the interviewer and the candidate and are just extracting money from the process.
The reality is, there is no fix.
I've been through multiple rounds of interviews with some companies with no end in sight, as many people have. I refer to the endless number of interview rounds as an obsession with process because employers tend to think that the more they evaluate people, the better result they get, regardless of how useful the processes they subject applicants to are. I've generally found people to be going through motions more than anything else, and the additional process is just more work that is not particularly useful to evaluate the candidates. It's still a lot of effort for both the employer and applicants.
That said, I do agree wholeheartedly that they should direct their efforts more towards the result of hiring a good candidate rather than just falling back to blind devotion to some series of processes to weed people out. They should focus on getting the most meaningful bit of information at each round to eliminate the most candidates possible, kinda like a form of optimal experimental design [1] if you are familiar with that term.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_experimental_design
LinkedIn et al make everything worse by making the application process so easy.
If you're a small company, the fix is to outsource the top of your funnel to a recruiting company you trust.
If you're a medium or large company, the fix is to require on-site work.
All this goes to show is that, for many companies, their hiring process for offshore employees is so sad that basic human interactions that would easily uncover blatant attempts like this are skipped.
The problem is that it's very difficult to assess how good someone is in their job. The solution is to promote the best engineers into management so they can vet the candidates.
Get a new CISO? You'll probably be buying the software from the last company he worked with and spending the next 3 years installing it all over just in time for them to declare mission accomplished you are secure and move on to the next square in the C-suite game of Life these dudes play. Then there's the people beneath them who want to be them mucking up the system playing get to the c-suite and not 'secure the company' or 'build good things'
Oh and if you've gone public your core business is probably on auto pilot with some gremlins keeping it running while your execs placate shareholders with layoffs and introducing AI.
People who actually want to do things, help people, and understand why the work needs done and is worth doing (the work that is anyway) are burnt the fuck out.
If you have a system that is down for 12 hours 3 times a year, it's fine - as long as a lot of other companies are also down. If you have one that's down for 2 hours once every 3 years, but you're the only one affected, that's terrible. Not because you're "losing sales", but because you can't bemoan a common supplier, point to "it's a global problem", and then get taken for a nice apology lunch by the account manager when your bill goes up 10% next year.
More like the whole system...
I've been duped simply by hiring a great engineering candidate who then farmed out the actual work to remote workers in Pakistan and India. We caught on fairly quickly thanks to one of them forgetting to login to one of our backend systems via vpn a few times. No idea how many companies he was "working for" but I'd bet we were one of many.
Remote work has amazing upsides and tremendous security implications.
If you're just throwing work over the fence and it takes network analysis to figure out who's doing it...then maybe you should just be hiring a contractor anyway.
But now with COVID a thing of the past, for "fairness" reasons (DEI?) we still do 100% remote interviews, but now have the ludicrous situation where we're asking interviewers to do absurd things like look for the reflections in the candidates' eyes/glasses to see if they're using ChatGPT, ask the candidate to swing the webcam around to make sure there are not other people in the room, ask them to hold their hands up to the camera to show they're not typing a prompt (which is even more stupid than it sounds because voice recognition is amazing these days), or ask them not to look away from the camera when answering questions (so not reading answers from another monitor) and other stupid things. How ridiculous.
The sooner we get back to in-person interviews the better. Get them to come to the office (which they'll need to do one day if they get the job) and sit next to them while they code on a work laptop).
Sorry to all those folks who want 100% remote, but this is why we can't have nice things.
(I don't know the answers to how to interview in this brave new world, but I'm increasingly skeptical of forbidding tools that people will be using for the job.)
a) Don't have to pay to fly candidates out, pay for their hotel, etc.
b) Don't have to pay relocation
c) Get access to a larger pool of candidates, so can price the wages lower than local wages would require
My last company there was a top down directive that in-person interviews were straight up not allowed, everything had to be over Zoom. Even for local candidates, for a job that was supposed to be in-person! Completely crazy IMO.
For developers I share my screen on MS Teams so everyone can watch, then hand them my laptop with Visual Studio. They've got 90 minutes to complete a small assignment while we look at them code - Google is allowed, so is copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, and we'll probably allow Copilot as well. The code needs to run and return the expected results. One candidate said, "this was great, it felt like real work".
For cloud admins, our Devops lead creates a new resource group, hands over his laptop, and we ask them to create a few resources and do the network and authentication to make them talk to each other. Most candidates can't do that anymore - we're finding they've become Terraform operators that don't know how the underlying technology works.
I'm not asking what the moral or ethical difference is. They're paying for engineering output, and if they are getting that output, why does it really matter whose fingers are typing it in?
If they cannot board a plane using their claimed identity from their claimed city of origin, you can stop there.
Despite all the weird crazy dog and pony show and jumping through hoops that most companies do now, most companies are abysmal at hiring.
It's essentially a subsidy heavily distorting a very specific market.
It depresses me, but you’re probably right about in-office work being the only guarantee against this type of scam. I wish we could just have nice things.
IF they can get such a 'candidate' hired... whats to say they couldn't continue the sham. One could imagine a team of hackers could easily pass of work that a single IC could reasonably have produced.
If their goal is exfiltration (or some other hack) of a {bitcoin exchange, govt, ...} actually putting in {weeks/months/year[s]} of actual work to insert someone into the right position at the right company is insanely worth it.
If AI does it, it’s the best thing since sliced bread.
I’m sorry but capitalists that want to have it both ways annoy me. Agree on what gets delivered for how much and get out of the way. The “employer” mindset doesn’t jive with capitalism ya’ll are so fond of.
> our Red Team launched an investigation using Open-Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT) methods.
basically mean "some guys in the company googled him"?
> Their resume was linked to a GitHub profile containing an email address exposed in a past data breach.
How is it an indicator of anything? Any actively used e-mail address that is older than a few years will be listed on haveibeenpwned.
> We received a list of email addresses linked to the [North Korean] hacker group, and one of them matched the email the candidate used to apply to Kraken.
Which is why everyone needs to switch to passkeys. It's crazy that we still use passwords for authentication
Before this interview, industry partners had tipped us off that North Korean hackers were actively applying for jobs at crypto companies.
We received a list of email addresses linked to the hacker group, and one of them matched the email the candidate used to apply to Kraken.
This single red flag should invalidate the candidate immediately, end of story.
And at one point i was getting a lot of candidates with european names, no picture, good resume.
And when I met them over a call it was very strange: they were all asian(with really typical nordic names), they were like clones in the way they talked and answered questions exactly the same. They also claimed to be from Sweeden/Finland/Norway for most of them but yet they had a strong asian accent. Not nordic at all.
This was really fishy and since the fit wasn’t there I stopped the interview without thinking about it too much. but the more I think about it, the more i tend to lean on North Corean candidates.
“Don’t trust, verify. This core crypto principle is more relevant than ever in the digital age. State-sponsored attacks aren’t just a crypto, or U.S. corporate, issue – they’re a global threat. Any individual or business handling value is a target, and resilience starts with operationally preparing to withstand these types of attacks.”
It's funny to see the CSO of a crypto firm say this. It's the opposite of the whole way crypto works. In crypto, the transaction is processed (trusted) if all the credentials and keys are correct, regardless of who's behind it.
I wonder what crypto-currency looked like before the digital age...
Edit: added -currency suffix to crypto :p
If hackers have access to the outside world (something they would need to be effective), they'd know the world thinks Kim is fat.
"He's very fat, haha!", end of story.
Edit: wait, or better yet: "how on earth would I know, and why are you asking this in a job interview? Is this because I'm Korean? I'd like to file a complaint with HR, what was your name again?"
The skill and IQ level varies widely, from super smart to super unskilled. And these roughly get sorted out into different groups with different MO's. North Koreans aren't some uniformly skilled group. You could be targeted by a team of world class bytecode exploit geniuses who rehearses every move, or by the equivalent of Milton from Office Space.
Dissing Kim is something that is not currently widely permitted in NK. Just isn't worth personally.
Not saying no one from NK never will, but so far almost everyone will immediately stop the conversation at this point. There are plenty of crypto people who have monthly or weekly encounters with NK job applicants.
I don't believe they are earnestly identifying spies, even if they believe it. Not that they need spies to hack our system anyway, they managed to bring half the country to a halt by themselves.
Now made even easier for fraudsters and including state actors thanks to Generative AI. Also:
> Generative AI is making deception easier, but isn’t foolproof. Attackers can trick parts of the hiring process, like a technical assessment, but genuine candidates will usually pass real-time, unprompted verification tests.
This is why Leetcode / Hackerrank and other (online assessments) OA in the technical interview is unfit for use in the age of AI.
> In the modern era, it’s an organizational mindset.
Security is a way of life for this company, but it would have easily fooled a less security-oriented company and it will just only get worse.
I wonder these are similar to the "tests" in Suits, where they (somewhat inadvertently) check whether someone went to Harvard by asking about the food places students typically went to.
I don't know, if I run into these questions in a job interview, especially with a small, less known company, I would be having serious questions about what this company is doing
They already knew the candidate's name, email, and GitHub were all part of past beaches. I could understand if they were fishing for more information to contribute to a shared list, but it seems like they knew virtually everything they needed to know.
Asking the candidate to justify the inconsistencies outright would've been just as helpful as the final interview IMO.
Is there something I'm missing there?
My assumption based on this was they weren't certain it was someone malicious and they were double checking their own conclusion. If not it makes no sense to tip the candidate off that you're suspicious about them.
At that point I'd say asking the candidate outright is better than playing a weird game of "Name 5 restaurants not on Google maps in the town you live in".
But if they were sure, then yeah, skip the interview altogether and forward the information to law enforcement.
What happened to standard procedures? 1. Phone interview. 2. Video interview. 3. In-person interview. 4. Job offer and hired. Heck, even standard was 1. Phone interview. 2. In-person interview. 3. Job offer and hired.
> From the outset, something felt off about this candidate. During their initial call with our recruiter, they joined under a different name from the one on their resume...
Then they had a candidate who was trying to cheat the systemeat
How did they establish and verify that the candidate was North Korean? Are North Koreans the only ones who try to remote work byt lying about their whereabouts?
Not at all.
If you live in a country outside of the US and you see the money software poeple make in the US it is mighty tempting to land a gig.
The fact that the persdon made simple mistakes and needed to be coached does not sound like a North Korean state operation.
If someone had told them Russian hackers are trying to get jbos.
Would they have asummed the person was Russian?
> We received a list of email addresses linked to the [North Korean] hacker group, and one of them matched the email the candidate used to apply to Kraken.
Whereas, I've been looking for quite a while, with very few bites. And nobody so far on HN Who's hiring responds, except for a place that seems to want 60h/week and pay for 40h/week.
Being genuine and truthful in the age of generative AI, LLMs, quiet quitting, /r/overemployed (on the sly working multiple 40h week jobs).... Being honest in this environment seems to be a losing endeavor.
It doesn’t really seem like it helps that much in résumé generation. Are people applying to enough hundreds of jobs that generative AI helps you keep up with the sheer volume of text you need to send? Some people are… but these aren’t people who know what good résumés look like, because those people write their own résumés, and these people aren’t people who are good with LLMs, because that skill is in-demand.
I think it’s just a tight, tough market. What I’ve seen is job searches that take longer and have higher standards. You’re competing with a larger pool of experienced candidates. And various companies are worsening the work conditions because the market favors it (and they want “unregretted attrition”).
It’s hard not to be cynical. But I think it’s just a shitty market to be looking for a job, it’s not a paradigm shift that favors dishonesty.
To the degree I skim resumes for anything nowadays, it’s AI slop. Automatic bin.
The interview call over zoom was clearly an AI avatar, and the answers were verbally spoken but constructed in a "bulleted" way that an LLM might produce.
All of the timestamps in the commits were made with the KST timezone.
In the past, they just tried to break into bank computers, then into crypto company's computers. For the last two years, they've been working on getting people into crypto companies.
But now they appear to have enough people to spare than they also have groups working on "honest" employment as remote workers, who may not even have theft as the first thing on their mind.
Here's a federal case where a US woman was convicted of helping North Korea steal the identities of 70 people, and then remote in as them, to do remote work:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/arizona-woman-pleads-guil...
The article could have been this short.
This article also helps the Korean hackers by providing in depth commentary on how they were caught and how to improve.
Actually, that's a job for counter-intelligence agencies (NSA? RCMP?), but I guess they will just laugh you call them.
If its not insider access then might as well hack an OSS maintainer and publish malicious open source package that everyone depends on to reach your target organization.
Use this to your advantage during the interview process to weed them out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853382
- online history was sparse and somewhat mismatching, and weird profile image reuse
- unexpectedly strong accent in calls, does not show video
- background reference checks a mess
If I were able to predict the future I would say that soon GitHub, GitLab and others will release inproved security sensors.
Sounds like you had to really push the boundaries of what is humanly possible to uncover this one.
How can Kraken found this out based only on Videocall?
I'm sure this wasn't a case of the most advanced/sophisticated attempt from North Korea and other bad actors, and probably just a case of them casting a wide net. But regardless based off of this writeup and the video shown dude should have never been given the time of day.
On a serious note, as a Kraken customer, I am very happy that they take security issues seriously. Reassuring.
this is a tongue in cheek test in crypto circles for like a year now
https://koliber.com/articles/how-to-avoid-hiring-a-north-kor...
At a previous remote job for a financial institution, they required a full background check with fingerprinting, reference checking, past employment verification, drug testing and in-person verification of identity and employment authorization. This was done for everyone, not just people they found "suspicious."
Frankly, the laws against applicant discrimination also makes having different processes or demanding different information from candidates because of national origin/ancestry/accent/etc. legally questionable.
> Before this interview, industry partners had tipped us off that North Korean hackers were actively applying for jobs at crypto companies. We received a list of email addresses linked to the hacker group, and one of them matched the email the candidate used to apply to Kraken.
Unless you were working in conjunction with law enforcement (with some guarantee re: the security of customer assets), it should have ended there. Going further may have piqued your interest, but...
> Instead of tipping off the applicant, our security and recruitment teams strategically advanced them through our rigorous recruitment process – not to hire, but to study their approach.
... you likely gave them more actionable data than they gave you.
This behavior was reckless, amateurish and I'd be pulling out my assets right away if someone acting as a custodian to my finances acted like this.
> It turns out there is a burgeoning sub-industry of college-aged males of Asian ancestry who cannot wait to get paid for participating in these schemes. There are Discord channels all around the world just for this. They make a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for allowing their identity to be misused or participating in the scheme. That way, they can interview in person or take drug tests if the job requires that.
https://blog.knowbe4.com/our-interview-of-a-north-korean-fak...
So basic HR processes?