A new breed of workers quietly clocking in across the United States.
On paper, they're the dream hire, skilled, low maintenance, always remote and often affordable.
“There were some of their best workers, it's like the perfect candidate, and we have to tell”
them, "Yeah, I know they are, they road it that way, it's all fake." They're taking jobs at Fortune 500s, an entertainment, ad, tech, we've even found them inside US government agencies, defense contractors, one even popped up at a nuclear utility. But strange things are happening. The person that wanted to be on camera, that person doesn't quite look right, there's
a pause after each question. They're using some sort of chatbot to answer questions. Employers are waking up to a deeply unsettling realization. Their employee is not who they claim to be. And they were actually good engineers.
You really were hiring an engineer, and you thought your hiring from one thing and you just happened to be hiring them to do something else on the side, like still your stuff.
“We decided at the end of that interview, we all got together, and said I think one of the”
North Koreans is going to feed for a job with us. Do you think there are big security risks for that, huh? So, uh, we like our enemies simple, a hermit kingdom, with questionable haircuts.
But caricature has a cost, never underestimate North Korea.
Once they've decided to do something, they will figure out a way to do it. And the adversary we joke about, it's not actually the one we're up against. The side government, we started looking at the North Korean cyber program at the Imagineers of Cyber. We've underestimated them at every turn.
And so, for years, we worked in this space. What will it look like if a rogue nuclear arm nation decides to attack the United States through cyber genes? We all got a wrong, right, and no one anticipated that the first time that that would happen would be over a movie about Potsmoking Journalists with Seth Rooken in it.
The FBI announced today that, and we can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack. Sony was about revenge, what followed was about revenue. It was like, in a movie where you have a bank fault heist, except for there's no mass, there's no hacking into the camera, there's no getaway cars, there's just guys that we board, you know, and it's just amazing for a nation's state to do this.
We had never up into this moment, seen a nation's state steal cold heart cash from another country. Here we had a nation's state attacking the country of Bangladesh and just stealing their money. We personally kept about 15 to 25% depending on how much we earned. We can steal money now at the speed of the internet, digital largest bank robberies in human
history, a bank robbery of a million dollars in cash is still headline news.
Crypto robbery of a million dollars worth of some token that you've never heard of, that's
a Tuesday. The biggest pressure was meeting the required payment quota to superiors. If you failed to meet quotas, even sleep and rest could be restricted.
“What's the current ballpark figure for how much the DPRK has stolen in cryptocurrency?”
Kind of our conservative lower bound estimate is around $5 billion and upper bound is around $6, maybe even more than that. These are cyber operators like none we've ever seen, with goals more suited to the Corleones than a nation's state. So just think of them as a very rich family that is half Mafia done, half Joseph Stalin,
and that's the goal, survival and money. We've seen North Korea some ways to become the world's largest bank robber. This is a criminal cyber startup and these guys are crushing it. And now, I've never been telling people IT workers in a room and nobody knew what I was talking about.
When I talk about it now, everybody's already had an experience with it. They are going to turn that insider access into an insider threat position, so an employee can become a foothold to follow on operations. These IT workers are absolutely everywhere, really what we have now is a worldwide chess game. And they've put all their pieces in place now.
If push comes the shove, you have thousands and thousands of organizations at your disposal that you can start blowing up from the inside. But to pull this off at scale requires ponds. And that may be their most clever move of all. Using Americans, whitting or not, to help them set the board.
