ESPIONAGE ENTERS THE CHAT

HOW NORTH KOREAN AGENTS FUNNELED UP TO $1 BILLION FROM CORPORATIONS INTO KIM JONG-UN'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM.

- BY AMANDA GERUT

IN CORPORATE SECURITY CIRCLES, a ghastly new fear has led to some strange advice for recruiters interviewing potential IT staffers: Ask the candidate to insult North Korea's Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un.

The idea is that if the interviewee is a North Korean agent posing as a regular candidate, he'll be visibly thrown off, outing himself.

But at a cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas this August, an analyst wearing a black hoodie and dark glasses who goes by "SttyK" broke some disappointing news to a packed crowd of researchers, executives, and government employees: That trick no longer works. "Do not [ask why] Kim Jong-un is so fat," SttyK warned in all-caps on a presentation slide. "They all notice what you guys have noticed and improved their opsec [operation security]."

It might sound far-fetched—like the plot of a Cold War-era spy movie—but the scheme is all too real, according to the FBI and other agencies, as well as the UN, cybersecurity investigators, and nonprofits: Thousands of North Korean men trained in information technology are stealing identities, falsifying their résumés, and deceiving their way into highly paid remote tech jobs in the U.S. and other wealthy countries, using artificial intelligence to fabricate work and veil their faces and identities.

In violation of international sanctions, the scam has pried open a gusher of cash for Kim's government, which confiscates most of the IT workers' salaries. The FBI estimates that the program has funneled anywhere from hundreds of millions to $1 billion to the authoritarian regime in the past five years, funding ruler Kim's ambition of building the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea (DPRK) into a nuclear-armed force.