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American tech giant Amazon More than 1,800 job applications from suspected North Korean operatives have been blocked, it has been claimed, as the East Asian nation is accused of deploying IT workers overseas to launder and generate funds for its nuclear weapons programme.
Amazon Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt noted in a Linkedin Post that the North Koreans were “attempting to secure remote IT jobs with companies around the world, particularly in the US”.
His company has seen an increase of about one-third in such applications in the last year, he said.
“Their objective is generally straightforward: to hire, get paid, and siphon off salaries to fund the regime’s weapons programs. At Amazon, we have detained more than 1,800 suspects dprk operator Joining from April 2024 and we have detected 27 percent more DPRK-affiliated applications quarter on quarter this year,” he said, using the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Mr. Schmidt alleged that Koreans often operate through “laptop farms,” meaning computers located in the US but controlled remotely from overseas. He cautioned that the problem is “not Amazon-specific” but is “likely to be widespread across the entire industry”.
According to Mr. Schmidt, common characteristics of North Korean applicants include incorrectly formatted phone numbers and questionable educational credentials. “Small details give them away. For example, these applicants often format US phone numbers with ‘+1’ instead of ‘1’. Alone this means nothing. Combined with other indicators, it paints a picture,” he said.
He also described a trend of fraudsters hijacking inactive LinkedIn accounts with stolen credentials to impersonate legitimate software engineers, sometimes even using AI tools or deepfakes to strengthen their cover during interviews.
Last year South Korea’s intelligence agency had claimed this was the operator from the north Posing as recruiters on LinkedIn to target nationals of a rival country working in defense companies to gain sensitive technical information.
Mr Schmidt alleged that his company had also “identified networks where people handed over access to their accounts in exchange for payment”.
Most of the income earned by these workers is reportedly sent back to the North Korean government, which, according to US officials, uses it to finance weapons programs.
The Amazon executive urged companies to remain cautious. “If you’re concerned about these threats in your organization, interrogate your database for common indicators: patterns in resumes, emails, phone numbers, educational backgrounds. Enforce identity verification across multiple hiring stages, and monitor for unusual technical behavior: unusual remote access, unauthorized hardware,” Mr. Schmidt said in the post.
Dr. Hong Min, analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, told news agency AFP that Answer “Was actively training cyber personnel and infiltrating key locations around the world”.
“Given the nature of Amazon’s business, the motive appears to be largely economic, making it highly likely that this operation was planned to steal financial assets,” he said.
The US Justice Department said in June that it had uncovered 29 laptop farms in the country that enabled North Koreans to get jobs by using stolen or fake identities.
In July, an Arizona woman was sentenced to nearly eight years in prison for running a laptop farm that allegedly assisted North Korean workers in securing positions at more than 300 U.S. companies, a scheme that netted more than $17 million for Pyongyang.
According to the Justice Department, such schemes have cost American companies approximately $88 million over the past six years.
In 2020, a US military report detailed information about North Korea Cyber warfare Description of capabilities, composition of its units and objectives of their operation.
The report said North Korea’s primary cyber warfare organization was called the Cyber Warfare Guidance Unit, commonly known as Bureau 121. The US military estimates the unit consists of about 6,000 personnel, many of whom hail from countries such as China, Russia, India, Malaysia and Belarus.
In 2015, the South Korean Ministry of Defense estimated that North maintained a specific cyber unit Up to 6,000 members.