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SECURITY FIRM'S NORTH KOREAN HACKER HIRE NOT AN ISOLATED INCIDENTSECURITY FIRM'S
NORTH KOREAN HACKER HIRE NOT AN ISOLATED INCIDENT

What happened to KnowBe4 also has happened to many other organizations, and it's
still a risk for companies of all sizes due to a sophisticated network of
government-sponsored fake employees.

Elizabeth Montalbano, Contributing Writer

September 19, 2024

6 Min Read
Source: DD Images via Shutterstock


A postmortem on the accidental hiring of a North Korean threat actor at a
security firm reveals a sophisticated, industrial-like network of fake IT
workers carefully groomed to fool US companies into giving them employment for
the financial gain of the North Korean government.

In July, security awareness training firm KnowBe4 was transparent in revealing
how a software engineer the company hired turned out to be a North Korean threat
actor who immediately began loading malware onto his company-issued workstation.

Though administrators managed to detect and shut down the malicious operation
before any harm was done, the incident served as a wake-up call about the
sophistication of a North Korean state-sponsored program that sends operatives
posing as credible IT workers out into the workforce.

Within weeks of the company's public revelation, KnowBe4 heard from more than a
dozen other organizations that had similar stories of either hiring or being
solicited for work by North Korean actors, the company revealed in a white paper
(PDF) released this week.

Companies from the size of Fortune 500 organizations to small businesses with
only 12 employees accidentally hired North Korean fake employees, with
organizations with largely remote workforces being at the highest risk.

Related:Dark Reading Confidential: Pen Test Arrests, Five Years Later

"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," Roger Grimes, KnowBe4 data-driven defense
evangelist, wrote in the report.


ANATOMY OF A STATE-SPONSORED FAKE EMPLOYEE PROGRAM

The fact that the fake worker scheme is much more widespread than initially
believed and that the people taking part in them are "exceptionally skilled" are
the greatest lessons learned from KnowBe4's experience, Erich Kron, security
awareness advocate at KnowBe4, tells Dark Reading.

"The ability to pass background checks, combined with the willingness and
ability to interview on several Zoom calls is indicative of just how polished
their program is," he says. "They seem to have processes in place that work
exceptionally well on organizations both large and small."

The program takes advantage of a cultural shift in employment among US
organizations over the past several years that has made companies more
susceptible to placing workers with malicious intent in legitimate positions,
Kron says.

This shift is a combination of organizations embracing the remote-work model,
and the modern interest in hiring people from around the globe based on their
knowledge and abilities rather than geographical location, he says.

Related:FBI Leads Takedown of Chinese Botnet Impacting 200K Devices

"This is extremely challenging when many of the best candidates and people
knowledgeable with cutting-edge technology are not US-born and may have strong
accents that may have been a barrier to hiring in the past," Kron says.
"Multicultural workforces are not only common in the modern business world but
are critical if organizations wish to hire the top talent in their fields."


A LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN

KnowBe4 learned much about how the various aspects of the North Korean program
operate in the wake of the company's own incident. The company discovered that
the chief goal of this program is financial gain, though operatives also to a
lesser extent engage in cyber espionage and even corporate sabotage activities,
once joining an organization.

Overall, there are four parts that are integral to making the fake employee
scheme work: North Korean-based program leaders; North Korean employees and
managers based in other countries; non-Korean scheme assisters that are usually
based in the country where the job is located; and 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, and other supporting activities.

Related:Zero-Click RCE Bug in macOS Calendar Exposes iCloud Data

The employees are often skilled IT workers and developers trained at North
Korean universities, and are usually located in foreign countries, such as
China, in shared living spaces and workspaces. They usually work in busy
call-center-like spaces; in fact, organizations that interviewed or hired these
fake employees often noted the noisy background, Grimes observed.

KnowBe4 described the employees ensnared in the program as themselves
unfortunate victims of a type of human trafficking. They receive very little of
the earned revenue, with most of it benefiting the North Korean government.
Moreover, close family members stay back in North Korea "to be used as personal
leverage to force the employee to toil long hours for very little wages," Grimes
wrote.


HOW TO SPOT A NORTH KOREAN FAKE EMPLOYEE

KnowBe4 offered substantial guidance for organizations during the hiring process
to help them spot a North Korean threat actor before taking that person on
board, as well offered after-hiring advice in case an operative makes it onto an
IT team.

Some characteristics and behaviors in a candidate to look out for include the
person being of Asian decent who is not highly skilled in English, though he or
she claims to have always lived in the US. The person will be using a fake
identity, a fake ID credential, and a fake work history that will all fail an
secondary verification.

The candidate also will supply personal websites, profiles, or GitHub sites that
seem overly basic, "often saying something and nothing at the same time, or you
can find very similar sites and profiles," Grimes wrote. These sites and
profiles also will have been posted only very recently and will have no Internet
presence outside of the properties supplied by the candidate.

After hiring, organizations may detect unnecessary logins by the employee on the
remote device provided by the company, from an IP address that doesn't match the
claimed geographical location, or other unusual behavior. Employees also may
work hours inconsistent with the time zone where they claim to be located.

Because the motivation for the threat actors is financial, another red flag
after hiring is a request to be paid in unusual or strange payment schemes,
including the demand for virtual currency.


PROTECTING YOUR ORGANIZATION

If an organization suspects a person is a threat actor during the hiring
process, it should be reported immediately to senior management for support in
vetting the person's legitimacy. KnowBe4 also advised that organizations "threat
model" their hiring process and make updates to mitigate the risk of hiring fake
employees, such as sharing the warning signs for these actors with those in the
direct hiring process.

Indeed, "reviewing hiring processes and reworking them around lessons learned
from the experience has been critical" to KnowBe4's incident recovery, and "well
worth the investment" to ensure the scenario doesn't repeat itself, Kron says.

If a company does suspect that one of its employees is a North Korean actor,
KnowBe4 advised that any device supplied to the person by the company is
immediately locked down to the bare minimum access, and monitored for unusual
activity, malware, log modifications, or unexpected language changes. The
company also should take further steps to monitor employee activity and, of
course, remove the person from the job if suspicions prove true.

In retrospect, KnowBe4 has learned that even though it already had a strong
security culture with many controls in place that allowed the company to
mitigate the situation quickly, "there is always room for improvement," Kron
says.

"Having been through this has allowed us to become even more secure than we were
previously," he says, "and by sharing the lessons we learned, we hope it will
help others."



Read more about:

CISO Corner



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Montalbano, Contributing Writer



Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer, journalist, and therapeutic writing
mentor with more than 25 years of professional experience. Her areas of
expertise include technology, business, and culture. Elizabeth previously lived
and worked as a full-time journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York
City; she currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal. In
her free time, she enjoys surfing, hiking with her dogs, traveling, playing
music, yoga, and cooking.


See more from Elizabeth Montalbano, Contributing Writer
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