We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job

https://blog.kraken.com/news/how-we-identified-a-north-korean-hacker

by 2bluesc • 1 year ago

380 290 1 year ago

blog.kraken.com

rvz2• 1 year ago

Not all attackers break in, some try to walk through the front door.

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.

spacebanana72• 1 year ago

genuine candidates will usually pass real-time, unprompted verification tests.

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.

xyzhut• 1 year ago

Its a pretty standard thing to do when you suspect someone of being not who they say they are. WW2 German spies would claim to be from New York, and OSS or MPs would ask them who the Yankees lead pitcher was. Not really a unique or new way of doing things.

Dachande663• 1 year ago

From somewhere in the depths of an old reddit thread, someone recommended asking candidates "How fat is Kim Jong Un?" Instant hang-up.

the_af6• 1 year ago

Why would this work? Spies are trained to behave like the host country would expect, why wouldn't hackers?

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?"

smallnix2• 1 year ago

Not sure some rank and file 50ct army "hacker" wants to take the risk to insult their god-dictator.

danielvf5• 1 year ago

These aren't spies first. They are often children of well to do, high loyalty group North Koreans. It's just a privileged job.

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.

arduanika• 1 year ago

In the depths of an old reddit thread, OR in a different thread that happens to appear today, alongside this one, on HN front page!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853382

Capricorn2481• 1 year ago

I'm with others: This is a silly anecdote from Crowdstrike of all companies. If I was asked how fat Kim Jong Un was, I would probably wait for some kind of "I'm kidding," and hang up if I didn't get it.

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.

donnachangstein2• 1 year ago

They used their leet "OSINT" skillz to ask the most basic of questions and background checks that nearly any traditional interview process would immediately uncover, then think it's so novel it's worthy of a blog post.

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.

corytheboyd3• 1 year ago

yet fake people are getting hired left and right.

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.

ta12434• 1 year ago

They're getting interviews left and right

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

sanktanglia• 1 year ago

I mean the article did point out that there were some official emails for other companies mixed in with the info for this user suggesting they or others have gotten hired and official emails at other companies

unsupp0rted• 1 year ago

There's always that guy on X who posts about having n remote jobs at the same, waiting to be fired from each so that he can replace its slot with another.

Then next year it's a different guy, same schtick.

cj• 1 year ago

80% of our recruiter's time is spent trying to figure out which candidates are real and which are fake.

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)

hibikir2• 1 year ago

As the last interviewer in a loop, I have caught fake candidates. This means they are getting through earlier rounds in my own employer, and makes me think I don't have a 100% success rate.

throwaway48476• 1 year ago

People tend to only interact either the process when they're looking for work, so rarely. The north Koreans do it everyday and optimize the process. It's like captchas where the bots have surpassed human skill.

anarticle• 1 year ago

I did see two fakes hired at my old company, a 20 something "senior eng" who couldn't use git or python, and shockingly a VP who managed to fake it for nearly a year. He was unceremoniously fired on a Friday, but he was still paid lol.

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.)

klodolph5• 1 year ago

The fake people are sometimes backed by entire teams (the article alludes to this). It’s easier to do well in your job when you’re supported by a team of people, maintaining the fiction that you’re one person.

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.

danielvf5• 1 year ago

It used to be only against specific industries, but now it's evolving. Now they have groups just going after remote IT jobs regardless of industry.

kelseyfrog4• 1 year ago

If this harms the crypto industry even a little I'm not sure I'd feel even a twinge of sympathy. Is there anything I can do to assist NK in these affairs?

ash-ali• 1 year ago

last years falcon (crowdstrike specific conference) they for the first time every showed live the interviews of 3 north koreans trying to get a job in software engineering positions at some forture 500 companies. i was baffled at every 'security' question to validate the person is actually in the US gets glossed over like: "my ID is at my home right now, and im in my office so i don't have that with me".

sam-cop-vimes3• 1 year ago

This sounds unnecessarily dismissive. It was a quick and interesting read, and there are some useful data points for every company that is hiring to improve their processes.

bravoetch• 1 year ago

Given the stakes, it was an inexpensive way to remain calibrated against this kind of attack. Sharing the information is also great. People seem to be expecting cyber-thriller level heist antics here, when it's often much simpler.

bri3d2• 1 year ago

On the surface it seems the "security" industry is lacking in the most basic of security processes when hiring.

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.

bko• 1 year ago

I think its useful to test as to what questions they are and aren't prepared for. In the future you won't necessarily know they were an imposter, so it's good to devise and test certain captcha like questions to tease out the fake from the real candidates.

ryandrake7• 1 year ago

I will say that hiring for remote jobs has gotten to be a gigantic time waste lately.

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.

andy99• 1 year ago

  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...

Good. I hope the whole hiring process gets blown up. The root cause of this is transactional hiring. Companies treat applicants like commodities, and now bad actors have found out how to game it.

hnlmorg• 1 year ago

I disagree completely with other posts claiming only crypto and finance are being targeted; while it's hard to confirm

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.

singleshot_• 1 year ago

Today’s bad startup idea:

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.

tinktank• 1 year ago

Why the condescending negativity? What would you they rather have done instead?

duxup• 1 year ago

I know some folks good folks who work in the security industry.

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.

donnachangstein2• 1 year ago

Absolutely! It's probably 90/10.

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.

z3t4• 1 year ago

Something in the industry as a whole is quite broken.

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.

nradov5• 1 year ago

The best engineers don't necessarily make good resource managers. Often it's the opposite. But good managers and recruiters will involve engineers early in the hiring process.

rvz2• 1 year ago

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.

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.

zdragnar2• 1 year ago

Even at small startups, posting engineering jobs will get you hundreds of applications a day. There's simply no way for employers to fairly go through them.

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.

atrettel2• 1 year ago

I wouldn't necessarily say that employers don't want to put in the effort. They put in a lot of effort, but employers direct the effort towards the process rather than the results.

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

libraryatnight• 1 year ago

Dude you ain't kidding. Security is all SaaS sales now and chasing corporate buzzwords, it's not security they're selling, it's insurance and the ability to outsource blame when you get popped.

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.

ta12434• 1 year ago

It took me worryingly long in my career (like 20 years) to realise that the CTO doesn't care if the technology solutions work, or if they're cost effective. What he cares about is not being interrupted on the golf course.

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.

data4lyfe• 1 year ago

You really have to just ask dumb interview questions. Testing them on answering questions while putting their hand over their face or their hands covering their eyes now. It's really dumbi-fied our interview processes (see https://datastream.substack.com/p/my-foolproof-interview-que...)

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

You need to keep in mind that only the dumbest people on Earth remain in the crypto space in 2025.

hn_throwaway_99• 1 year ago

Couldn't agree more. While I might not be as harsh against the blog post author, they made it seem like they were doing some high-level reconnaissance work, and at the end of the day the thing that made the NK candidate "unravel" was questions like "tell me about some restaurants in your town".

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.

thephyber• 1 year ago

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.

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.

tlhorsu• 1 year ago

The whole situation makes me as a job seeker even more paranoid. I had an initial interview scheduled over video but I had a power outage and had no choice but to use my phone. It's the dumbest coincidence ever and hasn't happened again, and if it makes me look suspicious, so be it. For some reason none of my phone cameras worked with Google Meet because Google engineering sucks and the interviewer kept asking me questions why my camera was off. I answered honestly that I had a power outage and this was my only device I had available on such short notice, that Google Meet wasn't working, etc. I even talked to the hiring manager half an hour over schedule since we clicked so well, submitted my code exam but was rejected without any explanation.

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.

Funes-• 1 year ago

Something in the industry as a whole is quite broken.

More like the whole system...

creer• 1 year ago

It's a marketing blog post. I guess they feel like this gives them "street cred" for being a security firm "targeted" by a north korean and how they "strategically interacted with" that person. It's not about the employment pipeline or basic vetting.

stavros2• 1 year ago

This is an interesting article, but doesn't this:

our Red Team launched an investigation using Open-Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT) methods.

basically mean "some guys in the company googled him"?

spacebanana72• 1 year ago

You can go further. Reach out to data brokers and see whether they've got any information from ad tracking / leaks.

BoredPositron• 1 year ago

Sophisticated.

stavros2• 1 year ago

Is that OSINT, at that point? I guess maybe if you get a free trial, but isn't that stretching the definition a bit?

Multiplayer• 1 year ago

Here's a heretical thought: Remote hiring is a massive achilles heel.

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.

dboreham• 1 year ago

And yet: do the same thing with AI and you're a cutting edge genius.

ferguess_k2• 1 year ago

Some people did this with in-office too I think, some years ago. Some people actually had two jobs, both sort of in-office. It's still possible to pull the tricks.

financypants• 1 year ago

The rate of this happening has got to be so low it's negligible.

aoanevdus• 1 year ago

The common pattern of requiring three days a week of in-office time makes it much harder.

pokstad• 1 year ago

Don’t forget remote workers who are required to work in one area and then travel to restricted areas and continue to work.

beezlebroxxxxxx• 1 year ago

I've heard through the grapevine of some designers (one who worked at Shopify) getting caught using Fiverr (or something similar) to farm out all of their work.

Despite all the weird crazy dog and pony show and jumping through hoops that most companies do now, most companies are abysmal at hiring.

criddell2• 1 year ago

What can you do during the hiring process to know that this amazing person, who aces every part of the interview, will farm out their work to cheap subcontractors?

corytheboyd3• 1 year ago

How do weekly 1:1 meetings with a manager not catch this very quickly? Okay, maybe the original suave interviewer comes back for those… Still feels like a good EM would pick up on discrepancies between work done and how the suave person talks about it.

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.

barbazoo2• 1 year ago

I also can’t imagine this not getting caught if not in the interview process surely during every day work. Maybe this says more about their work culture and not actually connecting with co workers. Perhaps the manager was just garbage who knows.

noitpmeder2• 1 year ago

This isn't necessarily the issue here -- this attempt seemed to be fairly motivated and had access to resources (AI, coaches, ...) to help them get through the process.

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.

mattlondon2• 1 year ago

Yep. It started with COVID where understandably 100% of interviews were remote.

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.

Espressosaurus3• 1 year ago

My suspicion is that it's purely monetary and driven by the finance people.

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.

sanderjd7• 1 year ago

And similarly forbid them from using AIs while they code on that work laptop in person? Are employees forbidden from using AIs for work? If not, why require that during evaluation? If it's not required during evaluation in person, why require it remotely?

(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.)

emchammer• 1 year ago

If you want to work as a clerk at Target, the video is not even an interview, it’s a one-way audition you record to be judged anonymously.

exhilaration• 1 year ago

Yeah after a disastrous remote hire I started requiring in-person 2nd round interviews. Company policy is that all future hires are hybrid only (not that we or anyone else is hiring these days...) so it just makes sense.

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.

tehjoker3• 1 year ago

COVID isn't in the past, just no one doing anything about it. :)

sam-cop-vimes3• 1 year ago

Totally agreed. The number of "engineers" who try to cheat their way through interviews, juggle multiple jobs without disclosing them makes it a total nightmare.

causal• 1 year ago

So that's probably a sign that your team culture and management isn't the best... Healthy teams communicate a lot and really get to know each other, whether in person or remote. Ideally with regular in-person meetups to reinforce those working relationships.

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.

sanderjd7• 1 year ago

Yeah I similarly find this baffling. This very flatly would not work in any job I've had, whether in person or remote.

whatnow373733• 1 year ago

Hate to be that guy, but.. what’s the problem? The work is getting done for the price you agreed on. You care how it’s done suddenly?

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.

badmintonbaseba• 1 year ago

If you don't want to be an employee then don't sign an employment contract.

mr_mitm• 1 year ago

An arrangement like that is probably violating data protection rules that everybody agreed on. In my company, customer data must not leave company systems, let alone the country.

triceratops• 1 year ago

It may cause the company to violate data protection, privacy, labor, and tax laws.

woah• 1 year ago

The funny part is that in these stories about fake candidates using a whole team of people, it sounds like they are actually successful in doing the work, something that had not been achieved in software dev outsourcing before

bluGill5• 1 year ago

Are they? I suspect someone I used to work with was outsourcing. They did great on the interview but their on the job performance wasn't nearly as good.

InitialLastName• 1 year ago

It's only "successful" because there's an alternative, presumably-nefarious funding stream from a third party who wants to gain access to IP/user data/influential functionality.

It's essentially a subsidy heavily distorting a very specific market.

tomrod• 1 year ago

Unless you're in a regulated industry, you might just have a new cost reduction strategy presented to you.

eloisant2• 1 year ago

Between this and legit candidates cheating with AI, I think we'll soon see the return of on-site interviews - even for remote positions.

qingcharles2• 1 year ago

I had a colleague doing this in 2006, and he wasn't remote. He would just sit playing games on his phone all day yet he would check in code. I could never figure it out, so I just asked him and he showed me the chat window to his friend back in the Czech Republic that he paid 25% of his wages to each month.

ryandrake7• 1 year ago

I'm not sure I'm really against this! --IF-- the company is happy with the results and code being delivered, and the compensation they are paying for that code, what is the actual, meaningful business difference between whether your colleague wrote it or the Czech guy wrote it?

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?

sally_glance• 1 year ago

Ironically if he told management that he's able to manage a remote team which provides the same amount of work for 25% cost there's a good chance they give him a raise and promotion to outsourcing manager /s

ryandrake7• 1 year ago

I don't think this has anything to do with remote vs. onsite work. It has more to do with remote vs. onsite interviews. A thorough onsite interview should catch all of these fake candidates. Companies should be doing at least one onsite interview regardless of whether the role itself is remote or onsite.

hughes• 1 year ago

A very easy way to verify a remote candidate's identity is to buy them a plane ticket to an in person interview.

If they cannot board a plane using their claimed identity from their claimed city of origin, you can stop there.

vunderba• 1 year ago

A friend of mine's company is completely remote only, but they use a shared workspace to conduct interviews for exactly this reason.

Jcampuzano2• 1 year ago

If people are hiring this sort of applicant I'm of the opinion they kind of deserve to be "pwned". The most basic of process should have weeded this dude out instantly at any modern company.

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.

mystraline• 1 year ago

Its quite saying, that in order to get interviews, you have to basically lie your way with various generative AI.

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.

klodolph5• 1 year ago

I’m a little skeptical that generative AI is an effective way to land a job.

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.

JumpCrisscross• 1 year ago

confirming the signal chat leaks were real

To the degree I skim resumes for anything nowadays, it’s AI slop. Automatic bin.

wnevets2• 1 year ago

Thanks to AI this problem will only get much worse.

stackedinserter3• 1 year ago

You can't AI if in person.

wnevets2• 1 year ago

they just out source the in person parts

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...

sltr• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the Lazarus Heist [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9

dabber21• 1 year ago

I wonder if something like eIDAS could help here (at least in EU countries)

wakeywakeywakey• 1 year ago

This is cool, but we'd be naive to think the other side is not also learning from this operation. The "gotcha" questions that foiled them at the end will likely make it into their playbook for next go around, and these attacks are going to be more sophisticated.

TheGCMadeMeDoIt2• 1 year ago

I fail to understand the whole "advancing the candidate through the interview to learn more about how they do this" plan.

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?

klodolph5• 1 year ago

Dollars to donuts the NK team is reading this article and adapting their strategies. IMO, rather than ask candidates to justify inconsistencies, you should forward the information to law enforcement and tell the candidate you’re hiring somebody else.

renewiltord• 1 year ago

Right, so if you have a tell-tale sign, you concoct a story around other things instead. Parallel construction. They fix all the silly things but you still have the tell-tale.

TheGCMadeMeDoIt2• 1 year ago

Well they claim the final interview involved asking the candidate very specific questions about the town they claimed to be living in, and hold up government issued ID to the camera.

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.

cosmicgadget2• 1 year ago

our security and recruitment teams strategically advanced them through our rigorous recruitment process – not to hire, but to study their approach.

notlive• 1 year ago

The article says they received a list of known NK hackers' emails in advance and the hacker used one of those addresses to apply. Pretty big red flag there if you ask me. Is it really unfair to halt the process at that point?

ThinkBeat• 1 year ago

Someone said that North Koreas are trying to get jobs. Ok

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?

layer82• 1 year ago

The article notes the following as the establishing link:

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.

charlieyu1• 1 year ago

but how legit is the list?

paradite• 1 year ago

I wonder what if this is just a decoy to get the more sophisticated candidate in.

danielvf5• 1 year ago

North Korea's efforts have been evolving.

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...

jborden13• 1 year ago

It's not just crypto, nearly all orgs at this point. As someone building in this space, it's pretty clear the N Koreans developed a deepfake toolkit that is being used/sold amongst the N Korean hacking groups there. Apparently it is for acquiring laptops, salaries to funnel to the State, and internal systems access for further damage.

noitpmeder2• 1 year ago

   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 doesn't sound so impressive?

This single red flag should invalidate the candidate immediately, end of story.

sam-cop-vimes3• 1 year ago

The article explains why they didn't invalidate the candidate immediately. They wanted to learn how they operate.

appleaday1• 1 year ago

I got interviewed by Kraken lol

ninjazee124• 1 year ago

This is pretty common stuff I saw with just even regular startups with remote applicants -- I take their claim that it was NK hacker with a grain of salt.

junon• 1 year ago

The interview a friend conducted a few weeks ago had a rich GitHub account of shoddy code across what was no less than 15 different languages, and a lot of it, all with names related to interview questions (many having the company name in them).

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.

joejoo• 1 year ago

These elite state hackers seemed a little careless from the start, to say the least…

yieldcrv• 1 year ago

All you have to do is ask them to say "Fuck Kim Jong Un"

this is a tongue in cheek test in crypto circles for like a year now

rs186• 1 year ago

asking the candidate to verify their location, hold up a government-issued ID, and even recommend some local restaurants in the city they claimed to be in.

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

TechDebtDevin• 1 year ago

"yeah, could you just hold up that ID please... Thanks, also a few more questions..Who was your favorite teacher, and what was the first car you owned ?"

65• 1 year ago

"Hah, I love software engineering, like my mother did. After all, her maiden name is Smith, and she used to be called a codesmith! What's your mother's maiden name? Maybe it also makes a funny engineering pun!"

Havoc• 1 year ago

Is there an uptick in this feels like there are suddenly multiple stories about it

stackedinserter3• 1 year ago

I would hire this person, set up a very basic work environment, forced him to run a spyware, learn something about them and made more interesting blogpost.

Actually, that's a job for counter-intelligence agencies (NSA? RCMP?), but I guess they will just laugh you call them.

ecocentrik• 1 year ago

I'm surprised it wasn't the government sanctioned haircut.

s-mon• 1 year ago

https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-stole-your-tech-job-... - same day, what a coincidence!

anonymousiam• 1 year ago

Commenting on the events, CSO Nick Percoco, said:

“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.

udev40963• 1 year ago

Apart from that, he is running a crypto exchange which is completely against the whole ideology of bitcoin and other notable crypto. The guy is a fucking joke. Every crypto exchange has been extremely shady, from coinbase to binance to tether. Kraken is no different

gouggoug• 1 year ago

Not to mention the silliness of this statement: "This core crypto principle is more relevant than ever in the digital age"

I wonder what crypto-currency looked like before the digital age...

Edit: added -currency suffix to crypto :p

arandomhuman• 1 year ago

One time pads, enigma machines, Caesar ciphers :p

taeorg742• 1 year ago

I mean if the credentials are correct than they transaction is by design verified and trusted.

orbital-decay• 1 year ago

I don't see anything about the guy being North Korean in the article. It's pure clickbait full of bragging about "our DNA".

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.

moshegramovsky• 1 year ago

100%. There is a bragging tone that felt completely unwarranted. Like being on a date with someone who is really insecure.

layer82• 1 year ago

The establishing link was this:

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.

udev40963• 1 year ago

Any actively used e-mail address that is older than a few years will be listed on haveibeenpwned.

Which is why everyone needs to switch to passkeys. It's crazy that we still use passwords for authentication

ls6122• 1 year ago

Don't passkeys still have tons of vendor lock-in attached? A password I can put into any password manager I want and transfer it to a different password manager and neither the password manager company nor the company for which I made the account is any the wiser.

lmeyerov• 1 year ago

We had similar earlier on at Graphistry. It was pretty obvious, especially by the time of video screens. We are still unsure if whether a hacker or just someone avoiding their history/nationality

- 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

iJohnDoe• 1 year ago

There are so many talented people trying to get their first or second job in the cybersecurity industry. Legit, honest, hard-working individuals want to get their chance in cybersecurity. So many posts from cybersecurity companies saying, "Meet us at conferences! Write content! Get to know us, then we'll hire you!" Then in their article they write this. Companies that are even letting these resumes or candidates get a second look are disgraceful. Companies need to get their shit together.

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...

aussieguy1234• 1 year ago

Apparently they're white brainwashed around Kim Jong Un and simply can't process any discussions that are even remotely negative about their dear leader.

Use this to your advantage during the interview process to weed them out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853382

ianhawes• 1 year ago

This is pretty boring. Let me know when you drop an implant on their host device and move laterally to other attackers devices or engage in a long-con and get them to travel to a US-extraditable country.

Geee• 1 year ago

Seems like they wanted to be obvious. At the same time they got their real hacker in. Typical diversion tactic.

wslh• 1 year ago

In my lesser known company, we've been receiving leads who share their codebase repositories which contain malware or buggy dependencies, even though we offer cybersecurity services.

If I were able to predict the future I would say that soon GitHub, GitLab and others will release inproved security sensors.

tsukikage• 1 year ago

TLDR: "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."

koliber• 1 year ago

I’ve had 4 such people interview. These guys were much easier to spot than the one at Kraken. I wrote up an article about how to spot these fake North Korean devs.

https://koliber.com/articles/how-to-avoid-hiring-a-north-kor...

lawgimenez• 1 year ago

The lack of proof is disturbing, a redacted screenshot would be nice.

seasluggy• 1 year ago

OSINT?

So basic HR processes?

abhisek• 1 year ago

This is happening with high value crypto companies with large security teams. Imagine what happens when OSS maintainers are asked to work on GitHub repositories with malicious code as part of fake job interviews?

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.

eunos2• 1 year ago

The candidate used remote colocated Mac desktops but interacted with other components through a VPN, a setup commonly deployed to hide location and network activity.

How can Kraken found this out based only on Videocall?

nikcub• 1 year ago

The North Korean efforts are amateur compared to government intel ops either placing or recruiting employees at large tech firms.

tough4• 1 year ago

Just ask them to badmouth their leader on interview.

crorella• 1 year ago

I think they detected instead of identified, as far as I know they didn't get the identity of the hacker.

codecraze• 1 year ago

In 2024 i’ve conducted a lot of interviews to recruit some frontend and backend engineers in full remote roles.

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.

stainablesteel2• 1 year ago

their strategy honestly says a lot of crazy things about their worldview

woutersf• 1 year ago

What do you mean by this (genuinely curious).

ForOldHack• 1 year ago

"A candidates Red Flags..." These guys are funny.

Aloisius• 1 year ago

This level of applicant checking at a financial institution does not inspire confidence.

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.

fracus• 1 year ago

"During their initial call with our recruiter, they joined under a different name from the one on their resume, and quickly changed it."

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.

g42gregory• 1 year ago

And his name was Jimmy…

On a serious note, as a Kraken customer, I am very happy that they take security issues seriously. Reassuring.

iagooar• 1 year ago

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.

Sounds like you had to really push the boundaries of what is humanly possible to uncover this one.

sjs382• 1 year ago

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, and quickly changed it. Even more suspicious, the candidate occasionally switched between voices, indicating that they were being coached through the interview in real time.
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.

tke248• 1 year ago

Congratulations you just provided source material to deepfake your staff.

aryan14• 1 year ago

Cross checked known malicious mail list with applicants, found a match and made a blog about it lol

We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job

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