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North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

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21–30 of 171 posts

Re: North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

#21

I don’t understand this. There are well qualified legitimate candidates desperate for a job. How are North Koreans getting these jobs instead? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43612448

Imagine that your reputation didn't matter, getting sued was out of the question, and there was no criminal liability: your job, backed by the government, is to be employed by as many tech firms for as long as you can, you'd probably work pretty hard on coming up with a reasonable but very good resume and work hard on how to interview well. Now, you're a professional interviewer and might conduct 10x-100x more interviews than your average dev, and have a network of people helping you optimize your cheating.

Given that background, I personally find it unsurprising that they're having success and AI tools are just making it that much easier

Re: North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

#23

I don’t understand this. There are well qualified legitimate candidates desperate for a job. How are North Koreans getting these jobs instead? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43612448

Is this to imply that north Koreans can't be well qualified legitimate candidates?

[deleted]

Re: North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

#24
post #14

This part is genius: > Nowadays, Leggio told Fortune he won’t even set up an interview with a candidate who seems promising on paper unless they agree to one final step. “Say something negative about Kim Jong Un,” Leggio tells potential job candidates, referring to the third-generation authoritarian Supreme Leader of North Korea, officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Through research, Leggio le…

I love it. That’s genius. Though I wonder if they’d be a special exception: You can talk bad about Kim if American Evil Capitalists force you as long as you get in and bring in the dough. I am afraid they are a lot more cynical than we give them credit, though.

I wonder how effective the propaganda apparatus in inside North Korea really. And also… I wonder if there’s a bit of a gap of stuff that is, like, not something that a westerner would be aware of.

Like if the person says “the carrot harvest was terrible last year and the uniforms are very itchy, it’s like he’s correctly but annoyingly prioritizing other things” they might be a spy.

I mean that is a silly example but you get the idea hopefully.

Re: North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

#25
So whenever I have gotten a job in tech, I've had to complete a background check if I get the job offer. How exactly are these fake profiles passing basic background checks?

They would have to be impersonating real people if pretending to be Americans. Unless these companies aren't doing the most basic background checks beyond just looking at resumes and LinkedIn profiles. Pretty weird and seems not too difficult to prevent...

Re: North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

#26

A flagged post mentions this is racist and typical anti immigration rhetoric. That's not true, there are only two types of North Korean people you'll meet, either those that have defected and escaped North Korea or those that are agents of the state of North Korea. There are very few defectors in existence and once they escape they're given full South Korean citizenship. This article is not about those people. The va…

You're doing the racist rhetoric.

There's no one in north korea that isn't "an agent of the state"? Give me a break. You sound ridiculous.

Re: North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

#27

So whenever I have gotten a job in tech, I've had to complete a background check if I get the job offer. How exactly are these fake profiles passing basic background checks? They would have to be impersonating real people if pretending to be Americans. Unless these companies aren't doing the most basic background checks beyond just looking at resumes and LinkedIn profiles. Pretty weird and seems not too difficult to…

The article gets into this where real Americans do job interviews and if they get a job they can keep 30% of the salary and have to pass off the remaining 70%:

> In the IT worker scheme, once someone involved gets an interview, North Koreans use remote-desktop tools to help coach people through the Q&A with a recruiter.

> Aidan Raney, founder of Farnsworth Intelligence, posed as an American willing to help North Koreans to investigate the issue for a client who almost hired a fake engineer. During the course of two video calls with three or four people who all said their names were “Ben,” Raney learned the details. “The Bens” would handle all the upfront work for him—creating a fake LinkedIn profile to verify his new identity for U.S. recruiters, formulating a bio, and sending it out to dozens of job postings with a new Gmail address they set up.

> The Bens even modified Raney’s headshot to a black-and-white photo so it wouldn’t resemble his usual picture, Raney told Fortune. If Raney got a job, he would show up for meetings, like a morning stand-up or scrum, and go about his day while a North Korean engineer handled the workload. Raney would be allowed to keep 30% of the salary but had to transfer 70% to the Bens using crypto, Paypal, or Payoneer.

> “What they were trying to do was use my identity to bypass background checks, and so they wanted this fake persona they created to be extremely close to the real-life version,” said Raney.

> The Bens got Raney an interview, and while it was ongoing, they used a remote-desktop application to set up a notepad on Raney’s screen so they could write out responses to the questions from the interviewer, Raney explained. And it worked: Raney got a verbal offer for a job with a private government contractor that paid $80,000 a year.

> He then had to immediately turn around and tell the company he couldn’t accept the offer and apologize for claiming their time.

Re: North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

#28
post #26

A flagged post mentions this is racist and typical anti immigration rhetoric. That's not true, there are only two types of North Korean people you'll meet, either those that have defected and escaped North Korea or those that are agents of the state of North Korea. There are very few defectors in existence and once they escape they're given full South Korean citizenship. This article is not about those people. The va…

You're doing the racist rhetoric. There's no one in north korea that isn't "an agent of the state"? Give me a break. You sound ridiculous.

There's no one _outside_ north korea

Re: North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

#29
post #26

A flagged post mentions this is racist and typical anti immigration rhetoric. That's not true, there are only two types of North Korean people you'll meet, either those that have defected and escaped North Korea or those that are agents of the state of North Korea. There are very few defectors in existence and once they escape they're given full South Korean citizenship. This article is not about those people. The va…

You're doing the racist rhetoric. There's no one in north korea that isn't "an agent of the state"? Give me a break. You sound ridiculous.

Is it really racist? North Korea is the most tightly controlled country in the world. Seems too easy to just throw out the racist card when you did not refute or provide any counter point.

I am certain there are good people in North Korea but it would be hard to figure folks allegiances. A lifetime of propaganda can really do something to the mind.

Re: North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

#30
post #26

A flagged post mentions this is racist and typical anti immigration rhetoric. That's not true, there are only two types of North Korean people you'll meet, either those that have defected and escaped North Korea or those that are agents of the state of North Korea. There are very few defectors in existence and once they escape they're given full South Korean citizenship. This article is not about those people. The va…

You're doing the racist rhetoric. There's no one in north korea that isn't "an agent of the state"? Give me a break. You sound ridiculous.

1984 is a good read. North Korea is somewhere there on thought police levels.
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