 "Amazon warns of North Korean IT infiltration, blocks over 1,800 applicants")
US tech giant Amazon has stopped more than 1,800 North Koreans from joining the company, saying they were trying to get remote IT jobs.
North Korea is known to send IT workers abroad to earn money and secretly route funds back to the country. Amazon said the attempts are part of a wider global problem and not limited to one company.
Sharp rise in suspicious job applications
In a LinkedIn post last week, Amazon’s Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt said North Korean workers had been “attempting to secure remote IT jobs with companies worldwide, particularly in the US”.
He said the company had seen nearly a one-third increase in such applications over the past year.
According to Schmidt, many of these workers use “laptop farms” -- computers physically located in the United States but controlled remotely from outside the country.
Schmidt warned that the issue is not specific to Amazon and “is likely happening at scale across the industry”.
He said some common red flags included wrongly formatted phone numbers and suspicious academic qualifications.
US laptop farm case exposes wider network
In July, a woman in Arizona was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for running a laptop farm that helped North Korean IT workers land remote jobs at over 300 US companies.
Officials said the operation earned more than $17 million for her and for North Korea.
Last year, South Korea’s intelligence agency warned that North Korean operatives had used LinkedIn to pose as recruiters. They reportedly targeted South Koreans working at defence companies to steal sensitive technology information.
“North Korea is actively training cyber personnel and infiltrating key locations worldwide,” Hong Min, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, told AFP.
“Given Amazon's business nature, the motive seems largely economic, with a high likelihood that the operation was planned to steal financial assets,” he added.
Long history of cyber warfare
North Korea’s cyber warfare efforts date back to at least the mid-1990s. Over the years, the programme has expanded into a cyber unit of around 6,000 members, known as Bureau 121, according to a 2020 US military report.
In November, Washington imposed sanctions on eight people accused of being “state-sponsored hackers”. US officials said their illegal activities were carried out “to fund the regime's nuclear weapons programme”.
The US Treasury Department has accused North Korea-linked hackers of stealing more than $3 billion over the past three years, mostly through cryptocurrency-related crimes.
(With agency inputs)