In July 2024, KnowBe4 revealed that we had unknowingly employed a North Korean who was pretending to be another person. We locked down the laptop computer that was despatched to the pretend worker inside 25 minutes of receiving an alert that he was making an attempt to do one thing suspicious, and at no time did the North Korean have entry to buyer knowledge or methods.
We’ve got since up to date our hiring processes accordingly to stop future occurrences and checked all present workers to verify no others have been in related issues.
On July 24,2024, we publicly posted the primary of a number of articles regarding the rent. It instantly went viral leading to dozens of reports tales and a number of media consideration. So far as we all know, we’re the primary firm to ever publicly reveal the small print of the North Korean hiring and detection occasion, regardless of a number of lots of different U.S. firms having skilled related conditions previously. We have been applauded by many safety consultants and legislation enforcement for publicly sharing our expertise.
There are proper now, probably, lots of of North Korean pretend workers at present employed by U.S. firms and certain hundreds all over the world. There are probably hundreds of U.S. firms at this time receiving resumes and purposes from North Korean pretend workers and a few of these candidates can be unknowingly employed.
One of the best ways to stop unknowingly hiring a pretend worker is to concentrate on it and implement wanted controls in your hiring course of to stop it.
To assist mitigate the specter of different firms hiring North Korean or different nation-state pretend workers, we publicly posted a number of associated weblog articles, two webinars, and an in depth whitepaper.
Listed here are among the different KnowBe4 North Korean pretend worker articles beforehand posted:
Tough North Koreans
You’d be stunned how tough the North Korean pretend workers are. They usually use stolen, however actual identities of residents within the nations they’re concentrating on, in order that any background checks go with flying colours. They make the most of AI-enhanced footage, video, and different instruments to get themselves employed. They’ve pretend LinkedIn profiles, pretend GitHub tasks, and pretend references prepared to provide them glowing opinions.
They’ve lots of of native residents serving to them to take care of the fraud. They’ll purchase pretend IDs, get pretend driver licenses and passports, and decide up and redistribute payroll checks. They’ve native residents decide up company-sent laptops who then set them up for distant logins in a bigger “laptop computer farm”. They use VPNs to pretend their location and voice-over-IP (VOIP) phone numbers to have the ability to take calls from anyplace.
Some employers have mentioned that the work they churned out was adequate that had it not been unlawful to rent them, possibly they’d have stored them. However most discovered the work product was poor to non-existent, and the North Korean pretend worker merely collected the paycheck till they have been lastly found and terminated. A whole bunch of hundreds of thousands to billions of {dollars} are being “earned” and despatched again to North Korea to fund their unlawful nuclear weapons program. Who desires to be part of that?
New Webinar
We’ve got an upcoming webinar masking the specter of North Korean pretend workers. One covers our private story of how we unknowingly employed a North Korean worker and the way we detected and terminated them. You could find information under:
Register by September twelfth @ 2:00 PM ET
Created and introduced by Roger A. Grimes, Knowledge-Pushed Protection Evangelist for KnowBe4, it covers extra info on North Korean pretend workers and offers extra mitigations than you’ll find anyplace else. There are dozens of solutions in each detecting and stopping pretend workers. It covers how one can stop hiring a pretend worker and even how one can detect one if they’re already secreted away amongst your workforce.
There are lots of, if not hundreds of lively North Korean pretend workers. Roger’s webinar will aid you finest stop turning into one more firm that unknowingly employed a North Korean pretend worker and aid you replace your hiring processes, so it by no means occurs to you. You’ll not discover a higher useful resource.
Glad hiring!