Identities of More Than 80 Americans Stolen for North Korean IT Worker Scams

For years, the North Korean government has found an emerging source of revenue to escape sanctions by trying its citizens with secretly apply for technological jobs from a distance in the West. A withdrawal operation newly revealed by the American police clearly indicates how the infrastructure used to carry out these programs was based in the United States-and how many identities of Americans have been stolen by the North Korean imitators to carry them out.

The Ministry of Justice on Monday announcement A sweeping operation to repress the American elements of the North Korean remote IT worker program, including the indictment against two Americans who, according to the government, were involved in operations, including one of the arched persons. Authorities also searched 29 “laptop fuses” in 16 states would have used to receive and accommodate PCs, North Korean workers access remotely, and seized around 200 of these computers as well as 21 web domains and 29 financial accounts which had received the revenues generated by the operation. The announcement and the acts of accusation of the Doj also reveal how the North Koreans have not simply created false IDs to integrate into companies of Western technology, according to the authorities, but have stolen the identity of “more than 80 American people” to usurp them in jobs in more than a hundred American companies and by spinning money in the Kim diet.

“It’s huge,” explains Michael Barnhart, an investigator focused on hacking and north-Korean spying in DTEX, a security company focused on initiates. “Whenever you have a laptop computers’ farm like this, it is the soft belly of these operations. Closing them through so many states, it’s massive.”

In total, the DOJ says that he identified six Americans who, according to them, were involved in a plan to allow imitators of North Korean technology workers, although only two have been named and charged criminal – Kejia Wang and Zhenxing Wang, both based in New Jersey – and only Zhenxing Wang was arrested. The prosecutors accuse the two men of having helped to steal the identity of the dozens of Americans so that the North Koreans to suppose, by receiving laptops who are sent to them by their employers, by establishing remote access for a North Korean device to control these machines in the world would have won. The DoJ says that the two American men also worked with six Chinese co -crusions named, according to the charge documents, as well as two Taiwanese nationals.

To create coverage identities for North Korean workers, prosecutors say that the two Wangs have accessed personal details of more than 700 Americans in private file research. But for individuals that the North Koreans were usurped by identity theft, they would have gone far further, using analyzes of drivers licenses and social security cards for identity thefts to allow the North Koreans to apply for jobs under their name, according to the Doj.

The accusation documents are not clear how these personal documents have been obtained. But Barnhart de DTEX says that North Korean identity operations generally obtain American identification documents from Dark Web Cybercrimine Cybercrimin Forums or data leakage sites. In fact, he says that the identities stolen over 80 years old cited by the DoJ represent a small sample of thousands of us that he has seen in certain cases from the infrastructure of North Korean hacking operations.