Thousands of North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

The UN estimates the North Korean IT worker scam has generated $250 million to $600 million every year since 2018.

Transcript

00:00These are people who are stealing in order to prop up an authoritarian regime that is

00:05very focused on developing nuclear weapons.

00:13So the North Korea IT worker scam, it has two prongs. You have the IT workers who are doing

00:19legitimate jobs and sending their salaries, big portions of their salaries to the government.

00:23And then you have the other prong, which is involved in data theft,

00:27cryptocurrency heists and extortion. And then they remit those illicit gains back to

00:32the North Korean government to fund the nuclear weapons program.

00:39The strategies they're using to avoid detection are really extreme. I had one source tell me that

00:47they don't like AI, they love AI, and that it's completely changed the game.

00:51So a lot of companies have started doing re-verification, showing your government ID,

01:02a selfie, a short video, giving it back to the company, and then allowing the company to sort

01:07of geo-locate you, make sure you are where you say you are, and you are who you say you are.

01:13The reaction from the other side is very telling. Usually the person will panic and block the person

01:23who is asking them to do that. If they do insult Kim Jong-un, then you know that this is probably

01:29not a North Korean engineer. I mean, this matters because this is a scheme where you don't, you might

01:37not necessarily know who you're working with remotely. If you're not seeing them regularly,

01:42if you're not communicating with them regularly. The other aspect is that this is in furtherance of

01:47another hostile nation's nuclear weapons program. The stakes are sky high.