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They used their leet "OSINT" skillz to ask the most basic of questions and background checks that nearly any traditional interview process would immediately uncover, then think it's so novel it's worthy of a blog post.

On the surface it seems the "security" industry is lacking in the most basic of security processes when hiring.

I don't think I've ever worked anywhere that could accidentally hire a North Korean without uncovering it somewhere in the hiring process, and all my jobs have been especially uninteresting.

What bothers me more is there are talented people sitting on unemployment right now that can't find a job, yet fake people are getting hired left and right. Something in the industry as a whole is quite broken.

> On the surface it seems the "security" industry is lacking in the most basic of security processes when hiring.

They found this person at the top of the funnel, before they even started the process, and then chose to go through with it out of curiosity / for advertising. I personally think it's silly (I don't think the advertising or learning about some comically basic TTP like "interview coaching" was worth their team's time) but it's not a lack of basic process in this case.

I will say that hiring for remote jobs has gotten to be a gigantic time waste lately. Even though even moderate background checking can filter these candidates out, it's quite time consuming and with the rise of generative AI, these type of candidates (whether state-sponsored malicious actors or overemployment shops) are appearing in every industry and every role constantly by the hundreds. I disagree completely with other posts claiming only crypto and finance are being targeted; while it's hard to confirm and the North Korean operation specifically may be more tailored, fake candidates are rampant throughout the tech industry now.

> I will say that hiring for remote jobs has gotten to be a gigantic time waste lately.

Not sure why this would be any different for remote jobs. All job interview processes (remote and in-office) I've ever done have had an in-person step, and that should be enough to filter these fake candidates, no? Are companies really doing 100% remote interviews, as in: you sign the offer letter without even meeting a single person in person??

Also, the in-person step is usually at the end, which means yes, you can waste a lot of time phone- and Zoom-chatting with fake candidates, but that is equally true for in-office vs. remote roles. Nobody starts with the in-person, on-site interview.

10 years ago all interviews were in person. With the pandemic they all went 100% remote. We proved that 100% remote positions can work and so there is temptation to continue doing 100% remote interviews for people that will be working remote anyway.

Though we have been burned by someone we believe (but cannot prove) was 100% remote and working two jobs at the same time (they were laid off in a recent downsizing before we could get enough evidence, but they didn't seem as productive as we would expect). So I expect even if you apply for a 100% remote position you will need to do one round of interviews onsite. (though who knows if this will protect us)

Wow, I guess my experiences are way unusual! Very interesting. Companies are really playing with fire by expecting to hire (either for remote or onsite work) 100% over the phone and videoconferencing.

> Are companies really doing 100% remote interviews, as in: you sign the offer letter without even meeting a single person in person??

You're dating yourself with that question. (yes, and they have been for a while)

The funniest interview I had, in a similar sneaky question, were the HR guy asked "so you wrote city X, I am also living here, whereabouts do you live?" and I turned the laptop and showed through my window a very unique skyscraper and a super marker right across my flat, and the guy recognized my building because his gf lived in the same building (had more than 100 flats), and we both had a laugh about it. (I got the job later but after having 2-3 more rounds of domain-specific interviews) Those days the "AI" was not around so I wouldn't be able to fake that even if I wanted.

EDIT: I also had interviews with Credit Suisse some years back (decade or so), they wanted me to speak to some people in the US and London, but didn't allow the video conference from home, but they asked me which major city in Europe I was in, so they book some meeting room in their own offices or some WeWork facility in case I was somewhere where they wouldn't have offices.

it's not even a new thing, certain companies were doing it before the pandemic. for a long time. I took my first offer at a remote company in 2012 -- I only met any of those people by chance, years later.

Yes, my fully remote company has been hiring for the past 3 months, I've conducted at least 70 first-round interviews, and we hire without in-person meetings.

Last company that hired me did everything remotely. This was in a company that only hired people living in countries where it had offices and no b2b contract so there are a number of things that needed to be local: - local ID or work permit - physical address in the country - bank account in same country - social security number

Stuff can be forged but that needs local spy level of skills to make it work.

They were also hiring a company specialized in background checks, I literally had to fill up a form with the 14 places I had been living in all my life with dates of entry and exit, super annpying given the UI was slow as hell and that I had low recollection of addresses and date of my early years, I had to ask my parents. I may have been able to cheat probably but I didn't try.

I am also seeking a new position and I have realized that most b2b / work from anywhere jobs you could apply for were for cryptocurrencied / blockchain related companies so they surely make it easier for malicious remote applicants. I think it means they are kind of desperate / have difficulty to find talents. In other areas most companies only hire people who live in same juridiction they have an office and hr department.

If your position is remote, and the coat of every in person interview includes two way flights, per diem and a hotel room, it's very tempting to skip the in person step, especially if you expect to fail a lot of in person candidates. Imagine paying that much when your interview to offer rate is 25%, and offer to hire is 50%. That $8k $10k extra per hire, on top of the normal cost of the funnel

You could do the expensive bit as a last step before making an offer.

the co[s]t of every in person interview includes two way flights, per diem and a hotel room

So… you mean the way it's been done for the last hundred years?

If your company is so small that you can't afford to bring someone in, then you hire locally.

Also, $8-10k per hire is too much for an interview. We do ours for under $1,000 with round-trip airfare, hotel, and meals. It's always the last step before signing.

Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable working for a company that didn't bring me in for an in-person interview, even for a remote job. It's just as important for me to evaluate the company as it is for them to evaluate me.

Yes, I am in a hybrid role, went through 5 interviews and several more check-ins, and the first time anyone saw me in person was on the first day when I picked up my laptop at the local office (which wasn't even required, I had the option of having it shipped at my home address)

> Are companies really doing 100% remote interviews, as in: you sign the offer letter without even meeting a single person in person?

Yes, I got multiple job offers like that back in 2022 at FAANG and similar places, and a lot of my friends who interviewed recently had plenty of processes that were fully remote as well. The first time I’ve actually met someone irl from the company I signed my offer with was at least a month after I already started working, and it was just an optional lunch meetup.

However, afaik, these days most serious companies like big tech or tech-centric finance (JS/Citadel/Jump/etc.) or top AI places (OpenAI/Anthropic/etc.) would have the final rounds in-person.

I went couple times through fully remote projects. No in-person interviews, no team gathering during the project work.

However, there was a background check done by third party agency. Basic check: criminal record, education and employment history (is it fake or real).

I did not get hired without in-person interview, but a number of my team members (certainly people I interviewed and recommended for hire) did.

All interview processes I've went through have indeed been 100% remote. When considering this, you should keep in mind the amount of developers that aren't earning top 1% incomes or being offered stock in companies. Things are probably a lot more casual than you may be used to.

>>Are companies really doing 100% remote interviews, as in: you sign the offer letter without even meeting a single person in person??

Yeah, absolutely. The company I work for is in a different country, seeing anyone else would require flying over there, I interviewed and got the job without meeting anyone in person.

My company didn't do any in-person interviews, it was all over Zoom. I've never been to the office (which is over 1,000 miles away) and likely never will.

> I disagree completely with other posts claiming only crypto and finance are being targeted; while it's hard to confirm

I can definitely confirm it’s not just finance and crypto being targeted.

I can also confirm it’s not just state sponsored North Korean agents too. Sometimes it’s just individuals trying to fake it until they make it.

However I dont agree with your conclusion that remote interviews are not dead because of this. Yes it’s annoying and time consuming filtering out these culprits, but the interview process already was an annoying and time consuming process to begin with. So I wouldn’t be so quick to throw the baby out with the bath water.

  I will say that hiring for remote jobs has gotten to be a gigantic time waste lately. Even though even moderate background checking can filter these candidates out, it's quite time consuming and with the rise of generative AI...

Do you want the industry to go back to only hiring from the top ~20 schools and by word-of-mouth networking? Coz that's the only viable alternative to the current interview process.

> Do you want to the industry to go back to hiring from the top ~20 schools and by word-of-mouth networking?

This never stopped and is still the case for "good" jobs btw.

Depends on what your definition of "good jobs" is but I know plenty of people from no name unis in third world countries who landed well paying jobs in FAANG thanks to the current process.

He means their bosses are from top 20 schools and didnt get hired because of their skills but their status

If you think this is going to lead to better treatment of candidates in the industry then i got really bad news for you

> I hope the whole hiring process gets blown up.

I can't see how the fake-candidate epidemic blows the hiring process up in anything but a candidate-hostile direction.

With the open hiring market becoming more inefficient, companies will move more towards hiring through networking and vetted sources (select college job boards etc.) rather than the open market. In situations where they evaluate candidates from open market listings, companies will now have invasive proof-of-identity red tape earlier and earlier in the funnel (for example, background checks prior to application rather than offer in places where that's legal). Plus, look forward to overly clever hiring panels introducing annoying "trap" questions and weird hoops like this article alluded to - I hope you're ready to review local restaurants and pick up random stuff in the room during your interview!

Hate to say it but jobs are commodities for the employee too. Why would it be any different the other way around?

So many roles are basically interchangeable and I’ll choose whichever one looks best on my resume or gives me some other tangible benefit. And I am prepared to bounce as soon as my vesting schedule drops. We all game this system too.

The days of us loyally working at any firm for 20 years, singing the corporate cheer songs and retiring with a pension are stuff of a different age.

I think its useful to test as to what questions they are and aren't prepared for. In the future you won't necessarily know they were an imposter, so it's good to devise and test certain captcha like questions to tease out the fake from the real candidates.

Today’s bad startup idea:

Firm that looks like it is hiring for remote jobs, but is actually a honeypot that harvests credentials and identifiers that will enable our clients tondetect scam applicants.

> yet fake people are getting hired left and right.

Hate to be that person, but what are you reading that makes you think this is true?

Agree that the article is pretty dumb though, especially the OSINT and Crypto “don’t trust, verify” comments. Feels like content marketing that didn’t really hit.

They're getting interviews left and right

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/29/north_korea_worker_in...

According to Crowdstrike (the company that wiped out most of global technology last year) at least

> My favorite interview question, because we've interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly

> My favorite interview question, because we've interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly

I'm sure there were a lot of false positives with that question.

If I was not reading HN and a few other sources I would likely hang up the phone too.

Thinking that it couldn't be a real job,... some phishing scam or hoax, asking ridiculous questions like that.

Depending on the job, it is quite likely the real talent would not be able to take the interview seriously after hearing suck a question.

Seriously weird times...

That's actually hilarious. Edit: Oops, accidentally responded to you instead of original quote.

> How fat is Kim Jong Un

Ha if I got asked that during an interview, I'd think either I went to the wrong interview or the interview is a red flag.

In crypto has become a known joke to ask that before hiring bc NK state actors really are focsuesd on it and hacking companies etc.

Hired left and right != interviewed left and right != interviewed quite a few at Crowdstrike.

Maybe you’re contributing to the narrative with the posts like above. It’ll certainly drive engagement.

80% of our recruiter's time is spent trying to figure out which candidates are real and which are fake.

It's really, really bad. We post a role, get 500 applicants, and nearly all of them are not legitimate. They all look amazing, really great resume, impressive LinkedIn, etc... but when you dig a little deeper, it's not that hard to find a bunch of red flags (LinkedIn profile create < 3 months ago, VOIP number, using VPN to submit job application, etc). You really have to know what signs to look for. They're very convincing fakes.

We're extremely vigilant about this issue as a company, yet we've had people get through 2 or 3 rounds before someone realized something was off (some people are really, really good at faking it).

I feel bad for small companies trying to hire. For us, it got to the point where we literally couldn't open a role unless we had a full time recruiter to sift through all the international candidates pretending to live in the US.

Edit: We've been dealing with this for a couple years now, and there still isn't a great solution. Unfortunately the only surefire "solutions" we can think of are also things that would make the interview process less enjoyable for real candidates, which sucks. (One idea was to ask candidates to show us photo ID during the video interview, but something about making a candidate do that just doesn't feel good - although we have tried it, and it has effectively stopped a few fake people from getting through)

> We post a role, get 500 applicants, and nearly all of them are not legitimate. They all look amazing, really great resume, impressive LinkedIn, etc... but when you dig a little deeper, it's not that hard to find a bunch of red flags (LinkedIn profile create < 3 months ago, VOIP number, using VPN to submit job application, etc). You really have to know what signs to look for. They're very convincing fakes.

To me, what you call "red flags" rather looks like a description of often outstanding programmers who are quite privacy-conscious (think into the direction of "somewhat cypherpunky").

It can be both. Due to how much time the fake applications take throwing out privacy conscious candidates seems like a worthy sacrifice to make.

On the other hand, consider that in this particular case, if you throw out a false positive, it is very often a really good programmer (though not necessarily the kind of programmer that big tech companies are looking for). :-)

Don't you have to ask for ID at the end anyway? So the only question is avoiding behavior that makes it look like you're a fake job listing harvesting PII or something.

Is the issue skilled candidates that are misrepresenting where they live, unqualified candidates with fake resumes trying to land the position anyway, or something else?

What have you tried?

If they trip enough red flags and it's an international issue, you could just be up front that you're suspicious (including why) and ask them to go outside and take a video of themselves in front of wherever they live. Then you check it against street view, scrutinize the vegetation, that sort of thing. Require the rest of the interview process to be via video call with a wide view of the room to ensure it's the same person. That solution is respectful of their time since it's quick and easy for them. They also presumably already shared their address with you so it's not particularly invasive.

Thank you for posting this. It definitely gives a lot of perspective about what is going on right now.

maybe leave the photo id ask for when there's suspicion only is fine

Why has asking for photo ID become politicized. ID for voting and job interviews seems like some of the most reasonable usage for an official ID.

The reason it is political for voting is that the rules needed to get a qualified ID are often impossible (or hard enough to suppress voting) for many legit voters.

These rules have become weaponized in a culture war, such as the requirement that an ID match the name on the birth record, meaning women whose last names changed during marriage require additional paperwork, often crossing state lines and in person visits. Bingo, disenfranchised a large population of women.

Personally I think voting should be mandatory as some countries have done, and verification should be easy.

Obviously you need documentation to work, and it’s fair to gather that documentation as early in the process as is reasonable (as in when an application is submitted)

> Obviously you need documentation to work

Elephant in the room, someone who can't produce photo ID to vote also can't produce it to work. So obviously you don't always need it to work (even if that's technically illegal). So long as the systemic issues remain I don't see an issue with that.

Actually come to think of it the low skill jobs I had when I was younger never asked for ID. Just my social, full legal name, and date of birth for their tax paperwork. Whereas the higher skill ones I had later demanded multiple forms of ID - I generally furnished them with both my passport and driver's license, which they took copies of and independently verified.

None of that is relevant for a high skill 100% remote job though. Not only does that demographic generally have easy access to ID, those rules really should be strictly enforced for remote positions since the internet is global.

Actually, that isn't the case with the SAVE act.

If I produce a social security card and any government ID, that is typically enough to work (in the US).

It won't be enough to vote under the proposed act. In many cases, what will be required is a birth certificate that exactly matches other ID. If your name has changed, unspecified documentation will be required beyond a marriage license or court approved name change. A government issued ID such as military or REAL ID will not suffice.

Well that is even more ridiculous. I have a passport but I think I've lost track of my birth certificate. My state ID isn't even REAL ID compliant (and I am very happy about that fact - it's blatant federal overreach that badly needs to be snubbed).

But the point remains - you often (in practice) don't need ID for low skill jobs whereas high skill ones generally carefully vet you. Thus hand wringing about requiring applicants for a high end fully remote tech job to fork over ID is a bit silly.

Well, that last doesn't bother me at all. If a person is doing something valuable, dilligence is due.

The blatant voter suppression efforts aiming at stopping a problem that results in less than a basis point of error in voting counts bothers me a lot, though.

There's always that guy on X who posts about having n remote jobs at the same, waiting to be fired from each so that he can replace its slot with another.

Then next year it's a different guy, same schtick.

I’ve also seen some claim that they will do that and simply sub-contract the work out to cheaper labor

If the employer is satisfied with the employees output, who is being harmed?

A company that is indemnifying their customers for security lapses perhaps?

Or a company that is handling HIPAA, GDPR or other sensitive data and is certifying that they are following policies around employee training, data sovereignty and document handling?

People tend to only interact either the process when they're looking for work, so rarely. The north Koreans do it everyday and optimize the process. It's like captchas where the bots have surpassed human skill.

As the last interviewer in a loop, I have caught fake candidates. This means they are getting through earlier rounds in my own employer, and makes me think I don't have a 100% success rate.

I did see two fakes hired at my old company, a 20 something "senior eng" who couldn't use git or python, and shockingly a VP who managed to fake it for nearly a year. He was unceremoniously fired on a Friday, but he was still paid lol.

I worked at an adtech company, he would give talks with powerpoints talking about internet of things which was absolutely wild. (We never sold or touched a single piece of hardware.)

I mean the article did point out that there were some official emails for other companies mixed in with the info for this user suggesting they or others have gotten hired and official emails at other companies

The fake people are sometimes backed by entire teams (the article alludes to this). It’s easier to do well in your job when you’re supported by a team of people, maintaining the fiction that you’re one person.

This isn’t happening left and right. It’s an attack against specific industries, like crypto and finance. It’s one part of a broader pattern of attacks.

last years falcon (crowdstrike specific conference) they for the first time every showed live the interviews of 3 north koreans trying to get a job in software engineering positions at some forture 500 companies. i was baffled at every 'security' question to validate the person is actually in the US gets glossed over like: "my ID is at my home right now, and im in my office so i don't have that with me".

As long as the speech pattern matches, the defenses are down. Just look at the formulaic responses of Russian bots/trolls.

"As a [role,gender,national ] posting from [country, city]..

[I agree with parent] *2 sentences .

[Actual opinion\story to push]

[Reminder on connting nationality/location ] "Thats my two Eurocents on that, take it or leave it ."

Its hyper fake, formulaic responses topic tugboats, but people go and engage in good faith all the time .

I mean you see that here on HN right? People claiming that any arbitrary question is something they have no idea about, like the color of their front door.

I’m not sure I know what you mean—I’m not sure I’d want to discuss the specifics of my living environment here though. Would you have any examples handy?

If your resume says you live in NYC for example, and I do something like "Man, I went to NYC once and got stuck in traffic on that stupid highway that goes up and down the coast of Brooklyn, what was the name of that thing?" and they respond with I-278, that would raise red flags. I have never heard of anyone calling the I-278 anything but the BQE.

It's just like the bar scene in Inglorious Bastards, with the fingers. There are so many obvious tells you can have people divulge if they aren't actually telling the truth.

I had a candidate who said he lived in San Francisco, so I asked him what neighborhood, and he responded "Uh, by the Golden Gate Bridge." Cool.

Later I looked more closely at the resume and saw some more red flags, like, he had a degree from "CA State University" -- like, which of the 23 CSUs bro?

We did have a couple fake people make it to the final round, the last one was cheating and still bombing -- I sent a picture to the guy who did the second-round interview like "is this the Jason Smith you interviewed?" and he said "Lol, no"

> If your resume says you live in NYC for example, and I do something like "Man, I went to NYC once and got stuck in traffic on that stupid highway that goes up and down the coast of Brooklyn, what was the name of that thing?" and they respond with I-278, that would raise red flags. I have never heard of anyone calling the I-278 anything but the BQE.

A counterstory: When my former boss started at the company, for the first years [!] he only "knew" very specific places (office, appartment, and one or two places associated with intensely practiced hobbies of him) in the city where the company is located, and basically lived inside the bubbles associated with these places and their surroundings.

Thus, to me it is very plausible that even if you lived in a city for many years, it is very easy to live in very isolated bubbles, and have barely any contact to people and their habits outside these bubbles.

> "Man, I went to NYC once and got stuck in traffic on that stupid highway that goes up and down the coast of Brooklyn, what was the name of that thing?"

I lived in NYC for a year and I have no clue. My answer would be probably something along the line of "Haha! Yeah. Traffic is terrible in the city... or so do my friends with cars say. I for one take the subway everywhere, so no clue what you are talking about. But sounds like a pain! Hope you were not delayed too long."

> It's just like the bar scene in Inglorious Bastards, with the fingers.

The problem is that's a work of fiction. These shibboleth tests work great in fiction where the author has full control over the whole universe. Work less well in reality where "universal" signals turn out to be a lot less universal. You will have a ton of false positives and a ton of false negatives.

If this harms the crypto industry even a little I'm not sure I'd feel even a twinge of sympathy. Is there anything I can do to assist NK in these affairs?

“These people (crypto industry) are bad people so it is justified to ignore the rule of law when hurting them” is a classic bad take. What you can do is regulate crypto into oblivion and make people feel bad about working in crypto.

If you assist NK, then you’re hurting crypto but you’re funding NK operations (e.g. NK soldiers assisting Russia against Ukraine).

If I don't assist NK then I'm tacitly assisting the crypto industry. We're in trolley problem territory now.

Is multi-track drifting an option?

Is that so that you can take out all of the people in the problem at once?

False dichotomy territory. You can assist neither of them and be happy.

You’re on a roll.

Cryptocurrency is just a technology to give people the means to generate assets, and transfer them, themselves. Advocating that the state's monopoly on violence be employed to prohibit people from using this technology is incredibly illiberal.

Regulation is just repression, rebranded.

I was with you until that final sentence. Regulation can be used for repression but it's also an essential part of any large scale real world system.

> Advocating that the state's monopoly on violence be employed to prohibit people from using this technology is incredibly illiberal.

I simply don't care anymore. Cryptocurrency's value is as a cultural shibboleth to identify individuals who deserve social interaction.

This is really not a constructive comment to make. This is going to ignite a flame war.

They're in control and responsible for their responses. Blaming someone else for one's anger or overreaction is indicative of abuse. "You made me lash out," is simply not a mature way to live one's life.

It used to be only against specific industries, but now it's evolving. Now they have groups just going after remote IT jobs regardless of industry.

Beyond just the salary, once they have access to the corporate network they can execute other attacks to steal from company accounts and infiltrate connected business partners. Most organizations still have very weak protection against insider threats.

> there are talented people sitting on unemployment right now that can't find a job, yet fake people are getting hired left and right. Something in the industry as a whole is quite broken.

An entire country has dedicated significant resources to getting some of their hackers hired. Those talented people you mention are likely trying to get hired by themselves. It’s not an industry problem so much as a coordinated attack.

The whole situation makes me as a job seeker even more paranoid. I had an initial interview scheduled over video but I had a power outage and had no choice but to use my phone. It's the dumbest coincidence ever and hasn't happened again, and if it makes me look suspicious, so be it. For some reason none of my phone cameras worked with Google Meet because Google engineering sucks and the interviewer kept asking me questions why my camera was off. I answered honestly that I had a power outage and this was my only device I had available on such short notice, that Google Meet wasn't working, etc. I even talked to the hiring manager half an hour over schedule since we clicked so well, submitted my code exam but was rejected without any explanation.

Because I got no explanation the potential reasons for my rejection rolled over in my head. I finished the exam to the best of my ability - was my ability just not good enough? If I went to e.g. the library or something to hunt for a station with webcams in time would I have not come off so suspect?

Since then I've gotten no other interview offers elsewhere and feel like a moron for blowing my one chance last month over such a stupid coincidence, if it really was the case they rejected me for thinking I was some kind of corporate spy. It really was the definition of "too good to be true." I will now pay way more attention to how I appear to the interviewer from now on, and carry extra devices/webcams in case the worst happens.

I know some folks good folks who work in the security industry.

It seems like there's a very WIDE range of quality people / companies, and an awful lot of compete FRAUDS.

For whatever reason "security" seems to have attracted a lot of carpetbaggers.

The good folks are very sensitive about it.

Absolutely! It's probably 90/10.

Nothing gives someone away as a poser as much as bragging about OSINT as if it's some sort of tradecraft meanwhile they're executing the same skills your average wine aunt does stalking her ex-boyfriend on Facebook.

You really have to just ask dumb interview questions. Testing them on answering questions while putting their hand over their face or their hands covering their eyes now. It's really dumbi-fied our interview processes (see https://datastream.substack.com/p/my-foolproof-interview-que...)

This sounds unnecessarily dismissive. It was a quick and interesting read, and there are some useful data points for every company that is hiring to improve their processes.

Given the stakes, it was an inexpensive way to remain calibrated against this kind of attack. Sharing the information is also great. People seem to be expecting cyber-thriller level heist antics here, when it's often much simpler.

It's a marketing blog post. I guess they feel like this gives them "street cred" for being a security firm "targeted" by a north korean and how they "strategically interacted with" that person. It's not about the employment pipeline or basic vetting.

> Something in the industry as a whole is quite broken.

The problem is that it's very difficult to assess how good someone is in their job. The solution is to promote the best engineers into management so they can vet the candidates.

The best engineers don't necessarily make good resource managers. Often it's the opposite. But good managers and recruiters will involve engineers early in the hiring process.

Couldn't agree more. While I might not be as harsh against the blog post author, they made it seem like they were doing some high-level reconnaissance work, and at the end of the day the thing that made the NK candidate "unravel" was questions like "tell me about some restaurants in your town".

All this goes to show is that, for many companies, their hiring process for offshore employees is so sad that basic human interactions that would easily uncover blatant attempts like this are skipped.

>Something in the industry as a whole is quite broken.

More like the whole system...

You need to keep in mind that only the dumbest people on Earth remain in the crypto space in 2025.

> What bothers me more is there are talented people sitting on unemployment right now that can't find a job, yet fake people are getting hired left and right. Something in the industry as a whole is quite broken.

It IS "broken" by design as employers just don't want to go through the effort into finding great candidates (even if they are truly exceptional) and now it is even easier for candidates to cheat it thanks to AI.

The ones claiming to "fix" it aren't fixing anything and are making it worse for both the interviewer and the candidate and are just extracting money from the process.

The reality is, there is no fix.

I wouldn't necessarily say that employers don't want to put in the effort. They put in a lot of effort, but employers direct the effort towards the process rather than the results.

I've been through multiple rounds of interviews with some companies with no end in sight, as many people have. I refer to the endless number of interview rounds as an obsession with process because employers tend to think that the more they evaluate people, the better result they get, regardless of how useful the processes they subject applicants to are. I've generally found people to be going through motions more than anything else, and the additional process is just more work that is not particularly useful to evaluate the candidates. It's still a lot of effort for both the employer and applicants.

That said, I do agree wholeheartedly that they should direct their efforts more towards the result of hiring a good candidate rather than just falling back to blind devotion to some series of processes to weed people out. They should focus on getting the most meaningful bit of information at each round to eliminate the most candidates possible, kinda like a form of optimal experimental design [1] if you are familiar with that term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_experimental_design

Even at small startups, posting engineering jobs will get you hundreds of applications a day. There's simply no way for employers to fairly go through them.

LinkedIn et al make everything worse by making the application process so easy.

If you're a small company, the fix is to outsource the top of your funnel to a recruiting company you trust.

If you're a medium or large company, the fix is to require on-site work.

This isn't really a new problem. I remember back during a previous tech downturn, the small-ish (~200 people) no-name company I worked for also got hundreds of applications a day. Yes, today, fake candidates and AI make it worse, but fundamentally the "huge number of people in the top of the funnel" problem has been a thing for a long time.

I was mostly replying to this bit:

> employers just don't want to go through the effort into finding great candidate

The notion that employers can put in the effort to give every candidate a totally fair shot so they can find the best ones is, I think, wrong, let alone the notion that they could but choose not to.

At my last company, we would have needed more people doing application reviews and interviews than we actually had employees if we wanted to do that.

Hell, I remember in college applying for a stock job at the local liquor store. When I went to hand in the application, I was told to put it on the pile- a stack of filled out applications thicker than several of my textbooks put together, suspiciously placed at the edge of a desk right next to a trash can.

> There's simply no way for employers to fairly go through them.

Sure there is. Randomly sample N, filter down to M, go through preliminary interview stages. Depending on how many that leaves you with rinse and repeat.

The important thing here isn't fairness from the perspective of the applicant. It's a process that works reliably for the company and doesn't unfairly waste applicant's time.

If the very first stage (application plus resume) is no longer a reliable signal then accept that fact and rework the process to match.

Dude you ain't kidding. Security is all SaaS sales now and chasing corporate buzzwords, it's not security they're selling, it's insurance and the ability to outsource blame when you get popped.

Get a new CISO? You'll probably be buying the software from the last company he worked with and spending the next 3 years installing it all over just in time for them to declare mission accomplished you are secure and move on to the next square in the C-suite game of Life these dudes play. Then there's the people beneath them who want to be them mucking up the system playing get to the c-suite and not 'secure the company' or 'build good things'

Oh and if you've gone public your core business is probably on auto pilot with some gremlins keeping it running while your execs placate shareholders with layoffs and introducing AI.

People who actually want to do things, help people, and understand why the work needs done and is worth doing (the work that is anyway) are burnt the fuck out.

It took me worryingly long in my career (like 20 years) to realise that the CTO doesn't care if the technology solutions work, or if they're cost effective. What he cares about is not being interrupted on the golf course.

If you have a system that is down for 12 hours 3 times a year, it's fine - as long as a lot of other companies are also down. If you have one that's down for 2 hours once every 3 years, but you're the only one affected, that's terrible. Not because you're "losing sales", but because you can't bemoan a common supplier, point to "it's a global problem", and then get taken for a nice apology lunch by the account manager when your bill goes up 10% next year.

Why the condescending negativity? What would you they rather have done instead?

Here's a heretical thought: Remote hiring is a massive achilles heel.

I've been duped simply by hiring a great engineering candidate who then farmed out the actual work to remote workers in Pakistan and India. We caught on fairly quickly thanks to one of them forgetting to login to one of our backend systems via vpn a few times. No idea how many companies he was "working for" but I'd bet we were one of many.

Remote work has amazing upsides and tremendous security implications.

So that's probably a sign that your team culture and management isn't the best... Healthy teams communicate a lot and really get to know each other, whether in person or remote. Ideally with regular in-person meetups to reinforce those working relationships.

If you're just throwing work over the fence and it takes network analysis to figure out who's doing it...then maybe you should just be hiring a contractor anyway.

Yeah I similarly find this baffling. This very flatly would not work in any job I've had, whether in person or remote.

I have worked in places where this would work...all terrible places that usually had someone with a "maverick" view of how organizations worked derived from reading Warhammer books or something.

> with a "maverick" view of how organizations worked derived from reading Warhammer books or something

Did they want to serve the god emperor of SAAS?

We all believe that using recruitment software is sufficient to prevent fraudulent candidates from being hired and that's what makes it true.

Yep. It started with COVID where understandably 100% of interviews were remote.

But now with COVID a thing of the past, for "fairness" reasons (DEI?) we still do 100% remote interviews, but now have the ludicrous situation where we're asking interviewers to do absurd things like look for the reflections in the candidates' eyes/glasses to see if they're using ChatGPT, ask the candidate to swing the webcam around to make sure there are not other people in the room, ask them to hold their hands up to the camera to show they're not typing a prompt (which is even more stupid than it sounds because voice recognition is amazing these days), or ask them not to look away from the camera when answering questions (so not reading answers from another monitor) and other stupid things. How ridiculous.

The sooner we get back to in-person interviews the better. Get them to come to the office (which they'll need to do one day if they get the job) and sit next to them while they code on a work laptop).

Sorry to all those folks who want 100% remote, but this is why we can't have nice things.

And similarly forbid them from using AIs while they code on that work laptop in person? Are employees forbidden from using AIs for work? If not, why require that during evaluation? If it's not required during evaluation in person, why require it remotely?

(I don't know the answers to how to interview in this brave new world, but I'm increasingly skeptical of forbidding tools that people will be using for the job.)

Because job interviews don't test real-world programming skills, which is a whole other issue.

The closer you can get to doing so, the better.

I think the best interview question, and really the only one you need to determine technical ability is ask someone to describe a http request in as much detail as possible.

To write code (even with the benefit of AI) effectively you need a mental model of the systems you work with, reading the chatGPT response doesn't prove you have that.

That's a stupid interview question for the vast majority of software jobs. Many people don't work with HTTP or web software at all.

So replace it with something from the relevant field.

Yes, technical interview questions should be relevant to the job field. What's your point?

The hard part is selecting good questions that act as reliable predictors of actual job performance. Very few hiring managers can do that reliably, although many fool themselves into believing that they can.

The point is that someone gave a specific example of the much more general concept of probing for mental model by way of detailed explanation of a process he ought to be familiar with. You objected to the specific details - knowledge of HTTP. That's not an indictment of the general approach.

That said ML models have gotten to the point where I'd have to disagree with OP that this approach will necessarily filter their use. However there are plenty of available mitigations, from latency of response to requiring a video feed that fully covers the candidate, his screen, and his keyboard.

It was a stupid example.

The "what happens when I enter facebook.com in the browser and hit enter" is/was a well-known FAANG question a few years back so I would expect that all the LLMs are well versed in it, as will be NK infiltrators

If you want to work as a clerk at Target, the video is not even an interview, it’s a one-way audition you record to be judged anonymously.

My suspicion is that it's purely monetary and driven by the finance people.

a) Don't have to pay to fly candidates out, pay for their hotel, etc.

b) Don't have to pay relocation

c) Get access to a larger pool of candidates, so can price the wages lower than local wages would require

My last company there was a top down directive that in-person interviews were straight up not allowed, everything had to be over Zoom. Even for local candidates, for a job that was supposed to be in-person! Completely crazy IMO.

The advantage of a larger pool of candidates is not mostly a financial benefit, IMO. The benefit is mostly the ability to hire from a larger pool of people especially with a specialized skillset, and also to have less of an echo chamber.

But yes, that directive to interview local candidates over zoom does seem very silly.

My experience is that yes it opens up the wider pool, but it makes the filtering process much more difficult in trade.

Opening up the wider pool without the in person interview is where things hit the wall since the filtering criteria everyone learned over their careers went out the door thanks to the online interview process. And the online interview process is much more subject to cheating--not exactly a huge concern in-person.

I agree that there's a trade-off in filtering, but I really just don't resonate with this "cheating" issue.

I haven't run into this thing where I'm talking to a video AI, but maybe I'll sing a different tune if that ever happens and is high fidelity enough to trick me.

If "cheating" just means using AI assistants to answer my interview questions, honestly I think I've done a poor job structuring the question and interview.

I do recognize this as a giant challenge right now, to structure interviews in a way that provides real signal, while allowing candidates to use the tools they'll actually be using for the job. But I don't think the challenge is significantly different between remote and in-person.

What is the local pool like?

If you want a software engineer silicone valley you can stay all local. There are companies in remote small towns who need a software engineer - they have to open up to non-local candidates as there are zero people in town who could do the job that don't work for them. There is always someone from elsewhere excited to move to a small town, but finding those people is hard. (and for those people finding a company that wants them is hard)

I'm in a tech hub so the local pool is wide and deep. But I was flown up for an interview, and I've known other people who were flown out, were hired, and have become locals.

This didn't used to be a huge problem.

Only a) is valid, as you can fly candidates for interviews and have them go back to their home city to work remotely.

Yeah after a disastrous remote hire I started requiring in-person 2nd round interviews. Company policy is that all future hires are hybrid only (not that we or anyone else is hiring these days...) so it just makes sense.

For developers I share my screen on MS Teams so everyone can watch, then hand them my laptop with Visual Studio. They've got 90 minutes to complete a small assignment while we look at them code - Google is allowed, so is copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, and we'll probably allow Copilot as well. The code needs to run and return the expected results. One candidate said, "this was great, it felt like real work".

For cloud admins, our Devops lead creates a new resource group, hands over his laptop, and we ask them to create a few resources and do the network and authentication to make them talk to each other. Most candidates can't do that anymore - we're finding they've become Terraform operators that don't know how the underlying technology works.

COVID isn't in the past, just no one doing anything about it. :)

The 1918 Pandemic is still around, too... A/H1N1

Different species, you can't generalize like that. It's pretty unclear what actually happened with H1N1. Scientists were able to resurrect the more virulent strain in the lab two decades ago and it was just as potent in lab animals...

Two possibilities are that it did in fact mutate to become "milder" or those strains were already circulating. Either way, H1N1 killed so quickly it ran out of victims and the highly lethal strain went extinct. Another notable aspect of H1N1 is that is mostly didn't kill directly, it made victims weaker to opportunistic lung infections and that's what killed them. Antibiotics have made this kind of attack vector much more difficult for viruses.

Omicron is only loosely analogous to the "flu fairy tale" as the major threat is Long COVID now and it is circulating at high levels. Other viruses have had vastly different natural histories, 1918 is only a single reference point, and a muddy one at that.

I was under the impression that it mostly killed by causing cytokine storms.

I won't claim to be an expert on 1918 influenza, but here's a reference for the claim I was making: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5481322/

After reading this, I am less sure of the claim "most", but it seems that opportunistic infection was an important factor. There were a few unpleasant ways to die...

I had a colleague doing this in 2006, and he wasn't remote. He would just sit playing games on his phone all day yet he would check in code. I could never figure it out, so I just asked him and he showed me the chat window to his friend back in the Czech Republic that he paid 25% of his wages to each month.

I'm not sure I'm really against this! --IF-- the company is happy with the results and code being delivered, and the compensation they are paying for that code, what is the actual, meaningful business difference between whether your colleague wrote it or the Czech guy wrote it?

I'm not asking what the moral or ethical difference is. They're paying for engineering output, and if they are getting that output, why does it really matter whose fingers are typing it in?

I can think of a few reasons, most obviously that it's a security nightmare - you've got a non-employee accessing and modifying your company's code and possibly having access to customer data. Some shops might not care about this, but it's ridiculously irresponsible in principle.

What if, instead, the guy was 100% honest and up front about it, and offered to enroll the Czech guy in all security checks that any other contractor would get, and treat them legally as any contractor would be treated?

I wouldn't see anything wrong with this, but I would be willing to bet that 99% of companies would not go along with it--for reasons I'm not sure I understand.

If they were ok with doing the work to bring in the overseas person in the first place why should they hire their onshore cutout? To do it legally would be a whole mess of getting involved in business in a new country.

The main problem is at that point the US guy is operating outside the model of being a direct employee of the company. He's operating as a contracting vendor.

There's legal aspects to the employer-employee relationship that are different than the company-vendor relationship.

Even reporting the pay to the IRS as personal income would probably be legally problematic, because from a legal aspect a vendor is being paid for a service not an individual receiving income from an employer.

Typically, employers expect more in return for your salary than engineering output - they pay for employees to be engaged with the business, learn it, become subject matter experts, so that their value over time increases and they deliver more than just the engineering. When all your need is engineering output, you hire contractors.

At the same time, you are correct that it doesn't matter who is typing it. One of my favorite setups I've worked under is where throwing it over the fence is explicit - where a small team of employees each has their own small team of contractors. The management doesn't care who does what, as long as the work gets done, so we were free to parcel work out to our contractors as we saw fit, and that the institutional knowledge stayed baked into our heads.

Ironically if he told management that he's able to manage a remote team which provides the same amount of work for 25% cost there's a good chance they give him a raise and promotion to outsourcing manager /s

I don't think this has anything to do with remote vs. onsite work. It has more to do with remote vs. onsite interviews. A thorough onsite interview should catch all of these fake candidates. Companies should be doing at least one onsite interview regardless of whether the role itself is remote or onsite.

A very easy way to verify a remote candidate's identity is to buy them a plane ticket to an in person interview.

If they cannot board a plane using their claimed identity from their claimed city of origin, you can stop there.

Only if they are 100% fake as opposed to farming out work to someone else. I can turn up to an interview in person no problem. When hired I just have the person in India use my name/picture and do the work.

Of course if they hire me as opposed to that person in India directly there is likely a reason they wanted someone in the US. Often those reasons are legal and somewhere a law is being broken.

Easy, but expensive way.

Are you really going to do this for all candidates that make it to the final round of interview?

Are you also going to compensate the time for the candidate if he doesn't get selected?

Unless what you're proposing is more a formality, and that unless the person doesn't show up he's guaranteed to get the job.

By the time someone gets to the on-site interview, the job should be "theirs to lose." You wouldn't be spending the cost of an on-site trip for every candidate that shows some promise during the distance interviews--you'd do it for those very few you're ready to give offers to already, but just want to double check a few in-person soft-skills things (and now, want to double check that he is who he says he is).

A friend of mine's company is completely remote only, but they use a shared workspace to conduct interviews for exactly this reason.

Totally agreed. The number of "engineers" who try to cheat their way through interviews, juggle multiple jobs without disclosing them makes it a total nightmare.

I've heard through the grapevine of some designers (one who worked at Shopify) getting caught using Fiverr (or something similar) to farm out all of their work.

Despite all the weird crazy dog and pony show and jumping through hoops that most companies do now, most companies are abysmal at hiring.

What can you do during the hiring process to know that this amazing person, who aces every part of the interview, will farm out their work to cheap subcontractors?

Nothing I guess? Except that they will continue to be vetted after being hired for the quality of their work.

just spitballing but even if someone has a remote computer after getting hired, and is onboarded they should not have access to sensitive systems. So while you can't completely prevent the possibility of hiring a malicious actor security should not simply be on/off. The register article mentioned how after these devs were hired they were immediately able to kick off their plans. I think security is not structured properly if that is the case.

It's hard. I mentioned in another comment I had a work colleague in 2006 who farmed out all his work. He was capable of doing the job, but it was simply more enjoyable for him to play video games all day while someone else did the work for 25% of his salary.

The thing I'm always curious about with this is: What is the actual bad thing happening here?

Is the subcontracted work not good enough? Well, then the problem is that the work is not good enough.

Is the person not contributing in other ways that you want them to contribute because they have other jobs? (eg. chat conversations, meetings, team building, etc.) Well, then the problem is that they aren't making those contributions.

Or is it just that you're paying them more than you would have to pay the subcontractors if you found and managed them yourself? Well, then you are totally free to skip the middleman and do that yourself. But there is, actually, value in finding and managing freelance work. I certainly don't want to do that myself! If someone is good at doing that, and the quality of the work they are managing is acceptable to me, then it seems like they might be earning their paycheck?

I do get that the dishonesty element is bad in and of itself, but I honestly wonder whether, if this is a problem a firm is having, they should consider hiring the work out to subcontractors, without any subterfuge.

Where I work, it would be sharing of credentials and lying (or at least being dishonest) about who did the work.

Yeah I hear that. My underlying point here is: Maybe you don't actually need a full time employee doing this job, if someone can successfully do it by spending a little time farming out to subcontractors.

The funny part is that in these stories about fake candidates using a whole team of people, it sounds like they are actually successful in doing the work, something that had not been achieved in software dev outsourcing before

It's only "successful" because there's an alternative, presumably-nefarious funding stream from a third party who wants to gain access to IP/user data/influential functionality.

It's essentially a subsidy heavily distorting a very specific market.

Are they? I suspect someone I used to work with was outsourcing. They did great on the interview but their on the job performance wasn't nearly as good.

Some people did this with in-office too I think, some years ago. Some people actually had two jobs, both sort of in-office. It's still possible to pull the tricks.

The common pattern of requiring three days a week of in-office time makes it much harder.

The rate of this happening has got to be so low it's negligible.

I agree. It's kinda hard to pull this off. Just saying.

Don’t forget remote workers who are required to work in one area and then travel to restricted areas and continue to work.

Between this and legit candidates cheating with AI, I think we'll soon see the return of on-site interviews - even for remote positions.

Unless you're in a regulated industry, you might just have a new cost reduction strategy presented to you.

How do weekly 1:1 meetings with a manager not catch this very quickly? Okay, maybe the original suave interviewer comes back for those… Still feels like a good EM would pick up on discrepancies between work done and how the suave person talks about it.

It depresses me, but you’re probably right about in-office work being the only guarantee against this type of scam. I wish we could just have nice things.

This isn't necessarily the issue here -- this attempt seemed to be fairly motivated and had access to resources (AI, coaches, ...) to help them get through the process.

IF they can get such a 'candidate' hired... whats to say they couldn't continue the sham. One could imagine a team of hackers could easily pass of work that a single IC could reasonably have produced.

If their goal is exfiltration (or some other hack) of a {bitcoin exchange, govt, ...} actually putting in {weeks/months/year[s]} of actual work to insert someone into the right position at the right company is insanely worth it.

Do you not have regular calls with teammates?

Sure I guess someone could physically turned up to an office to collect a laptop, be onboarded, get ID checked, then dial in to a few hours of meetings a week, muddle through any questions, rely on the team back at base helping, turn up in person to team get togethers every few months and manage to bluff their way through. It's not unprecedented - Frank Abagnale was running that type of con decades ago, Russia had the "Illegals" program of deep cover spies.

That's not exactly low cost.

Those regular calls is what limits how many places you can work for. You full time job becomes holding those calls, plus knowing just enough about the problem to sound intelligent. You can probably work 4 jobs this way.

Not just planned calls, random unplanned "jump on a huddle for a few minutes" ones at 11:42.

If you're working in another company and on a team meeting there, you're going to get caught pretty quick.

Yeah, that feels more right, and feels like a problem that is only going to get worse.

I also can’t imagine this not getting caught if not in the interview process surely during every day work. Maybe this says more about their work culture and not actually connecting with co workers. Perhaps the manager was just garbage who knows.

On their first day, they will get a lot of accounts, if they syphon data and m set up backdoors quickly, one day could be enough to cause a good chunk of the damage.

Saddens me a bit. I like to trust hires and give them pretty wide access to everything. For my own company, I've so far only hired people I worked with in the past, but when hiring strangers remotely, I'll probably have to rethink my trust-first model.

True, personally I have never gotten much of my access the first day, week or even month but it's certainly possible. Not sure though if syphoning data is the main goal here though as opposed to 1) syphoning money to NK or 2) planting backdoors.

Hate to be that guy, but.. what’s the problem? The work is getting done for the price you agreed on. You care how it’s done suddenly?

If AI does it, it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

I’m sorry but capitalists that want to have it both ways annoy me. Agree on what gets delivered for how much and get out of the way. The “employer” mindset doesn’t jive with capitalism ya’ll are so fond of.

An arrangement like that is probably violating data protection rules that everybody agreed on. In my company, customer data must not leave company systems, let alone the country.

I get the security issues, but let’s be honest. It’s not about that.

The poster included a sneer about “work”. This is about something else.

If you don't want to be an employee then don't sign an employment contract.

Ah, now suddenly you not only need to deliver work but you need to behave in a certain non-specified way. The contract then should arrange for that and perhaps pay extra because it’s a sign of dysfunction.

It may cause the company to violate data protection, privacy, labor, and tax laws.

And yet: do the same thing with AI and you're a cutting edge genius.

This is an interesting article, but doesn't this:

> our Red Team launched an investigation using Open-Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT) methods.

basically mean "some guys in the company googled him"?

You can go further. Reach out to data brokers and see whether they've got any information from ad tracking / leaks.

Is that OSINT, at that point? I guess maybe if you get a free trial, but isn't that stretching the definition a bit?

Sophisticated.

I don't see anything about the guy being North Korean in the article. It's pure clickbait full of bragging about "our DNA".

> Their resume was linked to a GitHub profile containing an email address exposed in a past data breach.

How is it an indicator of anything? Any actively used e-mail address that is older than a few years will be listed on haveibeenpwned.

The establishing link was this:

> We received a list of email addresses linked to the [North Korean] hacker group, and one of them matched the email the candidate used to apply to Kraken.

100%. There is a bragging tone that felt completely unwarranted. Like being on a date with someone who is really insecure.

> Any actively used e-mail address that is older than a few years will be listed on haveibeenpwned.

Which is why everyone needs to switch to passkeys. It's crazy that we still use passwords for authentication

Don't passkeys still have tons of vendor lock-in attached? A password I can put into any password manager I want and transfer it to a different password manager and neither the password manager company nor the company for which I made the account is any the wiser.

Some PW managers can store a passkey, but when tied to a device, if the device is compromised then all of your accounts are unless you're also using a yubikey or third device 2fa

I was talking about a self-hosted OIDC provider to avoid a vendor lock in. You can transfer passkeys from vaultwarden to any other password managers

   Before this interview, industry partners had tipped us off that North Korean hackers were actively applying for jobs at crypto companies.
   We received a list of email addresses linked to the hacker group, and one of them matched the email the candidate used to apply to Kraken. 

This single red flag should invalidate the candidate immediately, end of story.

The article explains why they didn't invalidate the candidate immediately. They wanted to learn how they operate.

Commenting on the events, CSO Nick Percoco, said:

“Don’t trust, verify. This core crypto principle is more relevant than ever in the digital age. State-sponsored attacks aren’t just a crypto, or U.S. corporate, issue – they’re a global threat. Any individual or business handling value is a target, and resilience starts with operationally preparing to withstand these types of attacks.”

It's funny to see the CSO of a crypto firm say this. It's the opposite of the whole way crypto works. In crypto, the transaction is processed (trusted) if all the credentials and keys are correct, regardless of who's behind it.

Apart from that, he is running a crypto exchange which is completely against the whole ideology of bitcoin and other notable crypto. The guy is a fucking joke. Every crypto exchange has been extremely shady, from coinbase to binance to tether. Kraken is no different

Not to mention the silliness of this statement: "This core crypto principle is more relevant than ever in the digital age"

I wonder what crypto-currency looked like before the digital age...

Edit: added -currency suffix to crypto :p

One time pads, enigma machines, Caesar ciphers :p

I mean if the credentials are correct than they transaction is by design verified and trusted.

In 2024 i’ve conducted a lot of interviews to recruit some frontend and backend engineers in full remote roles.

And at one point i was getting a lot of candidates with european names, no picture, good resume.

And when I met them over a call it was very strange: they were all asian(with really typical nordic names), they were like clones in the way they talked and answered questions exactly the same. They also claimed to be from Sweeden/Finland/Norway for most of them but yet they had a strong asian accent. Not nordic at all.

This was really fishy and since the fit wasn’t there I stopped the interview without thinking about it too much. but the more I think about it, the more i tend to lean on North Corean candidates.

their strategy honestly says a lot of crazy things about their worldview

What do you mean by this (genuinely curious).

i'm scared to explain it, you could be north korean

From somewhere in the depths of an old reddit thread, someone recommended asking candidates "How fat is Kim Jong Un?" Instant hang-up.

In the depths of an old reddit thread, OR in a different thread that happens to appear today, alongside this one, on HN front page!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853382

I'm with others: This is a silly anecdote from Crowdstrike of all companies. If I was asked how fat Kim Jong Un was, I would probably wait for some kind of "I'm kidding," and hang up if I didn't get it.

I don't believe they are earnestly identifying spies, even if they believe it. Not that they need spies to hack our system anyway, they managed to bring half the country to a halt by themselves.

Why would this work? Spies are trained to behave like the host country would expect, why wouldn't hackers?

If hackers have access to the outside world (something they would need to be effective), they'd know the world thinks Kim is fat.

"He's very fat, haha!", end of story.

Edit: wait, or better yet: "how on earth would I know, and why are you asking this in a job interview? Is this because I'm Korean? I'd like to file a complaint with HR, what was your name again?"

These aren't spies first. They are often children of well to do, high loyalty group North Koreans. It's just a privileged job.

The skill and IQ level varies widely, from super smart to super unskilled. And these roughly get sorted out into different groups with different MO's. North Koreans aren't some uniformly skilled group. You could be targeted by a team of world class bytecode exploit geniuses who rehearses every move, or by the equivalent of Milton from Office Space.

Dissing Kim is something that is not currently widely permitted in NK. Just isn't worth personally.

Not saying no one from NK never will, but so far almost everyone will immediately stop the conversation at this point. There are plenty of crypto people who have monthly or weekly encounters with NK job applicants.

I find this answer highly implausible, not the least because maintaining cover doesn't count as dissing ("I infiltrated the org by telling them the lies they wanted to hear" is hacking 101). Also, North Koreans aren't dumb.

I find some people's attitude to NK hackers slightly schizophrenic: either they are a credible threat or they are amateurs. Which one is it?

> Dissing Kim is something that is not currently widely permitted in NK

This wouldn't be "widely", this would be a specific interaction with a hostile foreigner for the purpose of infiltrating them. It's not the same as being allowed to say this to fellow North Koreans.

> Not saying no one from NK never will, but so far almost everyone will immediately stop the conversation at this point.

Legitimate candidates would at this point too, so as a tactic this is useless.

I am saying they are both a credible threat and many are amateurs. Those are not mutually exclusive.

You are talking about North Korea attackers from a theoretical point of view. For many people dealing with them is just a normal part of work. It's not an unknown that needs to be worked out logically from an armchair.

I'm saying this as someone who personally chatted with a North Korea persona that later tried to drop exploits on people, and the persona belonged to hacking group with at least one 50 million dollar heist. I've also seen the screenshots on many chats with North Koreans.

I don't consider screenshots evidence of anything, so I'll completely disregard that bit.

I'm curious about your personal experience though. Did you try this tactic, and did it work? And how sure are you these weren't random hackers or trolls, but actual NK agents?

> many are amateurs

So basically this would only get rid of the amateurs, low hanging fruit that would have been caught soon enough anyway, and do a "natural selection" of only the non-stupid NK hackers to infiltrate your org?

> And how sure are you these weren't random hackers or trolls, but actual NK agents?

"Agents" is way too big of a word. Just cogs in a corporate theft machine.

There's a lot of reasons I'm sure, but the biggest is because before a hack they asked for help doing something simple with a crypto address that was later used to test run the 50 million dollar theft that was North Korea. And also trying to drop North Korean linked malware is another data point.

This also hits my point about both dangerous and amateurs. They pulled off pretty sophisticated heist but, had to ask for help, asked for help using a crypto address tied to the theft, and blew the cover on an identity they had been building up for a year.

Here's a twitter thread I put together of both my conversation and others with this particular account:

https://x.com/danielvf/status/1905642180749775189

Thanks for the reply, I'll take a look!

Do you think asking them to say something offensive about Kim Jong Un would have outed them?

> I find some people's attitude to NK hackers slightly schizophrenic: either they are a credible threat or they are amateurs. Which one is it?

I have no clue whether the proposed approach works, but there's a pretty coherent model that explains how it could, no schizophrenia needed: They are competent people in a cult.

Being unable/unwilling to diss Dear Leader even when it's advantageous to do so is very typical cult stuff. In fact, it's sort of why cults are dangerous. They compel people to do maladaptive things in service of the "ideals" of the group/leader.

This applies both to the spy directly (perhaps they would personally be unwilling to say such a thing), but also to their entire chain of command. Cults by their nature are not good at passing nuanced instruction like "you can say bad things about Dear Leader under these circumstances." Just because you're willing to diss KJU to get in the door doesn't mean you know your entire chain of superiors are cool with it.

So you're saying NK agents are completely different to, say, Soviet era agents, who could and would say anything as long as it furthered their mission?

Ok, fair enough. In common perception of NK, they do seem bizarre, not like the Soviets during the Cold War.

I think it's unwise to dismiss them as lunatics incapable of deceit. If I were a NK agent, I'd work towards this notion, "NK are incapable of lying if it would diss their leader, that's how we get them!". In fact, I would spread this notion in Reddit, like the OP mentioned.

By the way, this still leaves the easy way out of "why are you asking about Kim Jong Un in a job interview, is it because I'm Korean? I'd like to speak to your HR department please".

I'm just guessing but comparing the NK hacker to a late Cold War era Soviet professional spy is the wrong comparison. Maybe the closer comparison is asking a Soviet party member belonging to the professional middle class with a bit of spy training during the Great Purges to talk negatively about Stalin out of the blue.

Yeah I never got the impression that Soviets were as successfully isolated from the world as North Koreans are. But I’m not an expert on the matter!

I mean, I totally agree that this should not be relayed as a working method to identify spies haha. Just that it’s not beyond believability it’d work in some circumstances.

Not sure some rank and file 50ct army "hacker" wants to take the risk to insult their god-dictator.

If he's acting under NK command, this wouldn't be insulting, it's just doing a hacker's work.

Besides, you cannot have it both ways: either North Korean hackers are a "50ct army" or they are a credible threat. Most seem to be arguing they are a credible threat.

Also, he can always take the second option: "why are you asking about this in a job interview?", something many legitimate Korean candidates could ask.

This is pretty boring. Let me know when you drop an implant on their host device and move laterally to other attackers devices or engage in a long-con and get them to travel to a US-extraditable country.

I fail to understand the whole "advancing the candidate through the interview to learn more about how they do this" plan.

They already knew the candidate's name, email, and GitHub were all part of past beaches. I could understand if they were fishing for more information to contribute to a shared list, but it seems like they knew virtually everything they needed to know.

Asking the candidate to justify the inconsistencies outright would've been just as helpful as the final interview IMO.

Is there something I'm missing there?

Dollars to donuts the NK team is reading this article and adapting their strategies. IMO, rather than ask candidates to justify inconsistencies, you should forward the information to law enforcement and tell the candidate you’re hiring somebody else.

Well they claim the final interview involved asking the candidate very specific questions about the town they claimed to be living in, and hold up government issued ID to the camera.

My assumption based on this was they weren't certain it was someone malicious and they were double checking their own conclusion. If not it makes no sense to tip the candidate off that you're suspicious about them.

At that point I'd say asking the candidate outright is better than playing a weird game of "Name 5 restaurants not on Google maps in the town you live in".

But if they were sure, then yeah, skip the interview altogether and forward the information to law enforcement.

    > Name 5 restaurants not on Google maps in the town you live in".

Not to mention that, as another commenter mentions, most serious candidates would get a question like this and nope out of the interview.

Right, so if you have a tell-tale sign, you concoct a story around other things instead. Parallel construction. They fix all the silly things but you still have the tell-tale.

> our security and recruitment teams strategically advanced them through our rigorous recruitment process – not to hire, but to study their approach.

> asking the candidate to verify their location, hold up a government-issued ID, and even recommend some local restaurants in the city they claimed to be in.

I don't know, if I run into these questions in a job interview, especially with a small, less known company, I would be having serious questions about what this company is doing

"yeah, could you just hold up that ID please... Thanks, also a few more questions..Who was your favorite teacher, and what was the first car you owned ?"

"Hah, I love software engineering, like my mother did. After all, her maiden name is Smith, and she used to be called a codesmith! What's your mother's maiden name? Maybe it also makes a funny engineering pun!"

Someone said that North Koreas are trying to get jobs. Ok

Then they had a candidate who was trying to cheat the systemeat

How did they establish and verify that the candidate was North Korean? Are North Koreans the only ones who try to remote work byt lying about their whereabouts?

Not at all.

If you live in a country outside of the US and you see the money software poeple make in the US it is mighty tempting to land a gig.

The fact that the persdon made simple mistakes and needed to be coached does not sound like a North Korean state operation.

If someone had told them Russian hackers are trying to get jbos.

Would they have asummed the person was Russian?

The article notes the following as the establishing link:

> We received a list of email addresses linked to the [North Korean] hacker group, and one of them matched the email the candidate used to apply to Kraken.

but how legit is the list?

Its quite saying, that in order to get interviews, you have to basically lie your way with various generative AI.

Whereas, I've been looking for quite a while, with very few bites. And nobody so far on HN Who's hiring responds, except for a place that seems to want 60h/week and pay for 40h/week.

Being genuine and truthful in the age of generative AI, LLMs, quiet quitting, /r/overemployed (on the sly working multiple 40h week jobs).... Being honest in this environment seems to be a losing endeavor.

I’m a little skeptical that generative AI is an effective way to land a job.

It doesn’t really seem like it helps that much in résumé generation. Are people applying to enough hundreds of jobs that generative AI helps you keep up with the sheer volume of text you need to send? Some people are… but these aren’t people who know what good résumés look like, because those people write their own résumés, and these people aren’t people who are good with LLMs, because that skill is in-demand.

I think it’s just a tight, tough market. What I’ve seen is job searches that take longer and have higher standards. You’re competing with a larger pool of experienced candidates. And various companies are worsening the work conditions because the market favors it (and they want “unregretted attrition”).

It’s hard not to be cynical. But I think it’s just a shitty market to be looking for a job, it’s not a paradigm shift that favors dishonesty.

> confirming the signal chat leaks were real

To the degree I skim resumes for anything nowadays, it’s AI slop. Automatic bin.

This is pretty common stuff I saw with just even regular startups with remote applicants -- I take their claim that it was NK hacker with a grain of salt.

The interview a friend conducted a few weeks ago had a rich GitHub account of shoddy code across what was no less than 15 different languages, and a lot of it, all with names related to interview questions (many having the company name in them).

The interview call over zoom was clearly an AI avatar, and the answers were verbally spoken but constructed in a "bulleted" way that an LLM might produce.

All of the timestamps in the commits were made with the KST timezone.

"During their initial call with our recruiter, they joined under a different name from the one on their resume, and quickly changed it."

The article could have been this short.

This article also helps the Korean hackers by providing in depth commentary on how they were caught and how to improve.

North Korea's efforts have been evolving.

In the past, they just tried to break into bank computers, then into crypto company's computers. For the last two years, they've been working on getting people into crypto companies.

But now they appear to have enough people to spare than they also have groups working on "honest" employment as remote workers, who may not even have theft as the first thing on their mind.

Here's a federal case where a US woman was convicted of helping North Korea steal the identities of 70 people, and then remote in as them, to do remote work:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/arizona-woman-pleads-guil...

It's not just crypto, nearly all orgs at this point. As someone building in this space, it's pretty clear the N Koreans developed a deepfake toolkit that is being used/sold amongst the N Korean hacking groups there. Apparently it is for acquiring laptops, salaries to funnel to the State, and internal systems access for further damage.

This is happening with high value crypto companies with large security teams. Imagine what happens when OSS maintainers are asked to work on GitHub repositories with malicious code as part of fake job interviews?

If its not insider access then might as well hack an OSS maintainer and publish malicious open source package that everyone depends on to reach your target organization.

We had similar earlier on at Graphistry. It was pretty obvious, especially by the time of video screens. We are still unsure if whether a hacker or just someone avoiding their history/nationality

- online history was sparse and somewhat mismatching, and weird profile image reuse

- unexpectedly strong accent in calls, does not show video

- background reference checks a mess

> We received a list of email addresses linked to the hacker group, and one of them matched the email the candidate used to apply to Kraken.

Sounds like you had to really push the boundaries of what is humanly possible to uncover this one.

https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-stole-your-tech-job-... - same day, what a coincidence!

> The candidate used remote colocated Mac desktops but interacted with other components through a VPN, a setup commonly deployed to hide location and network activity.

How can Kraken found this out based only on Videocall?

I'm surprised it wasn't the government sanctioned haircut.

Reminds me of the Lazarus Heist [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9

The North Korean efforts are amateur compared to government intel ops either placing or recruiting employees at large tech firms.

And his name was Jimmy…

On a serious note, as a Kraken customer, I am very happy that they take security issues seriously. Reassuring.

If people are hiring this sort of applicant I'm of the opinion they kind of deserve to be "pwned". The most basic of process should have weeded this dude out instantly at any modern company.

I'm sure this wasn't a case of the most advanced/sophisticated attempt from North Korea and other bad actors, and probably just a case of them casting a wide net. But regardless based off of this writeup and the video shown dude should have never been given the time of day.

Cross checked known malicious mail list with applicants, found a match and made a blog about it lol

I think they detected instead of identified, as far as I know they didn't get the identity of the hacker.

Seems like they wanted to be obvious. At the same time they got their real hacker in. Typical diversion tactic.

I’ve had 4 such people interview. These guys were much easier to spot than the one at Kraken. I wrote up an article about how to spot these fake North Korean devs.

https://koliber.com/articles/how-to-avoid-hiring-a-north-kor...

This level of applicant checking at a financial institution does not inspire confidence.

At a previous remote job for a financial institution, they required a full background check with fingerprinting, reference checking, past employment verification, drug testing and in-person verification of identity and employment authorization. This was done for everyone, not just people they found "suspicious."

Frankly, the laws against applicant discrimination also makes having different processes or demanding different information from candidates because of national origin/ancestry/accent/etc. legally questionable.

Congratulations you just provided source material to deepfake your staff.

> From the outset, something felt off about this candidate. During their initial call with our recruiter, they joined under a different name from the one on their resume, and quickly changed it. Even more suspicious, the candidate occasionally switched between voices, indicating that they were being coached through the interview in real time.

> Before this interview, industry partners had tipped us off that North Korean hackers were actively applying for jobs at crypto companies. We received a list of email addresses linked to the hacker group, and one of them matched the email the candidate used to apply to Kraken.

Unless you were working in conjunction with law enforcement (with some guarantee re: the security of customer assets), it should have ended there. Going further may have piqued your interest, but...

> Instead of tipping off the applicant, our security and recruitment teams strategically advanced them through our rigorous recruitment process – not to hire, but to study their approach.

... you likely gave them more actionable data than they gave you.

This behavior was reckless, amateurish and I'd be pulling out my assets right away if someone acting as a custodian to my finances acted like this.

Is there an uptick in this feels like there are suddenly multiple stories about it

I wonder what if this is just a decoy to get the more sophisticated candidate in.

I wonder if something like eIDAS could help here (at least in EU countries)

The lack of proof is disturbing, a redacted screenshot would be nice.

> Not all attackers break in, some try to walk through the front door.

Now made even easier for fraudsters and including state actors thanks to Generative AI. Also:

> Generative AI is making deception easier, but isn’t foolproof. Attackers can trick parts of the hiring process, like a technical assessment, but genuine candidates will usually pass real-time, unprompted verification tests.

This is why Leetcode / Hackerrank and other (online assessments) OA in the technical interview is unfit for use in the age of AI.

> In the modern era, it’s an organizational mindset.

Security is a way of life for this company, but it would have easily fooled a less security-oriented company and it will just only get worse.

> genuine candidates will usually pass real-time, unprompted verification tests.

I wonder these are similar to the "tests" in Suits, where they (somewhat inadvertently) check whether someone went to Harvard by asking about the food places students typically went to.

Its a pretty standard thing to do when you suspect someone of being not who they say they are. WW2 German spies would claim to be from New York, and OSS or MPs would ask them who the Yankees lead pitcher was. Not really a unique or new way of doing things.

And in Ronin when Deniro asks Sean Bean the color of the boathouse at Hereford.

Just ask them to badmouth their leader on interview.

Thanks to AI this problem will only get much worse.

You can't AI if in person.

they just out source the in person parts

> It turns out there is a burgeoning sub-industry of college-aged males of Asian ancestry who cannot wait to get paid for participating in these schemes. There are Discord channels all around the world just for this. They make a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for allowing their identity to be misused or participating in the scheme. That way, they can interview in person or take drug tests if the job requires that.

https://blog.knowbe4.com/our-interview-of-a-north-korean-fak...

Then what? It should be the same person at day 1, no?

This is cool, but we'd be naive to think the other side is not also learning from this operation. The "gotcha" questions that foiled them at the end will likely make it into their playbook for next go around, and these attacks are going to be more sophisticated.

There are so many talented people trying to get their first or second job in the cybersecurity industry. Legit, honest, hard-working individuals want to get their chance in cybersecurity. So many posts from cybersecurity companies saying, "Meet us at conferences! Write content! Get to know us, then we'll hire you!" Then in their article they write this. Companies that are even letting these resumes or candidates get a second look are disgraceful. Companies need to get their shit together.

What happened to standard procedures? 1. Phone interview. 2. Video interview. 3. In-person interview. 4. Job offer and hired. Heck, even standard was 1. Phone interview. 2. In-person interview. 3. Job offer and hired.

> From the outset, something felt off about this candidate. During their initial call with our recruiter, they joined under a different name from the one on their resume...

I would hire this person, set up a very basic work environment, forced him to run a spyware, learn something about them and made more interesting blogpost.

Actually, that's a job for counter-intelligence agencies (NSA? RCMP?), but I guess they will just laugh you call them.

The article says they received a list of known NK hackers' emails in advance and the hacker used one of those addresses to apply. Pretty big red flag there if you ask me. Is it really unfair to halt the process at that point?

OSINT?

So basic HR processes?

"A candidates Red Flags..." These guys are funny.

In my lesser known company, we've been receiving leads who share their codebase repositories which contain malware or buggy dependencies, even though we offer cybersecurity services.

If I were able to predict the future I would say that soon GitHub, GitLab and others will release inproved security sensors.

Apparently they're white brainwashed around Kim Jong Un and simply can't process any discussions that are even remotely negative about their dear leader.

Use this to your advantage during the interview process to weed them out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853382

All you have to do is ask them to say "Fuck Kim Jong Un"

this is a tongue in cheek test in crypto circles for like a year now

These elite state hackers seemed a little careless from the start, to say the least…

I got interviewed by Kraken lol

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TLDR: "We received a list of email addresses linked to the hacker group, and one of them matched the email the candidate used to apply to Kraken."

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