Job hunting is a fresh kind of hell. Hours are wasted sifting through open roles, tweaking cover letters, dealing with obtuse recruiters—and that’s all before you get started with potential interviews. Arguably, some of the world’s most prolific job applicants—or at least most persistent—are those of North Korea’s sprawling IT worker schemes. For years, Kim Jong Un’s repressive regime has successfully sent skilled coders abroad where they’re tasked with finding remote work and sending money back to the heavily sanctioned and isolated nation. Each year, thousands of IT workers bring in somewhere between $250 million and $600 million, according to United Nations estimates.
Now an apparent huge new trove of data, obtained by a cybersecurity researcher, sheds new light on how one group of alleged North Korean IT workers has been running its operations and the meticulous planning involved in the money-making schemes. Money made by scam IT workers contributes to North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction development efforts and ballistic missile programs, the US government has said. Emails, spreadsheets, documents, and chat messages from Google, Github, and Slack accounts allegedly linked to the alleged North Korean scammers show how they track potential jobs, log their ongoing applications, and record earnings with a painstaking attention to detail.
The cache of data, which represents a glimpse into the workaday life of some of North Korea’s IT workers, also purportedly includes fake IDs that may be used for job applications, as well as example cover letters, details of laptop farms, and manuals used to create online accounts. It reinforces how reliant upon US-based tech services, such as Google, Slack, and GitHub, the DPRK workers are.
“I think this is the first time to see their internal [operations], how they are working,” says the security researcher, who uses the handle SttyK and asked not to be named due to privacy and security concerns. SttyK, who is presenting their findings at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today, says an unnamed confidential source provided them with the data from the online accounts. “There are several dozen gigabytes worth of data. There are thousands of emails,” says SttyK, who showed WIRED their presentation ahead of the conference.
North Korea’s IT workers have, in recent years, infiltrated huge Fortune 500 companies, a host of tech and crypto firms, and countless small businesses. While not all IT worker teams use the same approaches, they often use fake or stolen identities to get work and also use facilitators who help cover their digital tracks. The IT workers are often based in Russia or China and are given more freedom and liberties—they’ve been seen enjoying pool parties and dining out on expensive steak dinners—than millions of North Koreans who are not afforded basic human rights. One North Korean defector who operated as an IT worker recently told the BBC that 85 percent of their ill-gained earnings were sent to North Korea. “It’s still much better than when we were in North Korea,” they said.
Multiple screenshots of spreadsheets in the data obtained by SttyK show a cluster of IT workers that appear to be split into 12 groups—each with around a dozen members—and an overall “master boss.” The spreadsheets are methodologically put together to track jobs and budgets: They have summary and analysis tabs that drill down into the data for each group. Rows and columns are neatly filled out; they appear to be updated and maintained regularly.