Amazon blocked over 1,800 fake job applications from suspected North Korean agents since April 2024, according to a senior company executive. Stephen Schmidt, Amazon’s chief security officer, disclosed the infiltration attempts in a December 23 LinkedIn post, amid a surge of cyber scams connected to North Korea in the U.S. tech sector.
The communist regime has been attempting to secure employment for its operatives primarily in the United States in remote IT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning positions, where they could smuggle their wages into Pyongyang’s coffers and fund the state’s weapons programs.
North Korean agents have taken remote IT jobs via so-called laptop farms, computers which are physically based in the United States, but operated remotely from abroad to conceal their true locations.
American, Japanese, and South Korean officials met in Tokyo in August to improve collaboration in combating the growing threat of fake IT workers from North Korea to their respective tech industries. The officials jointly declared in a press statement that “hiring, supporting, or outsourcing work to North Korean IT workers increasingly poses serious risks, ranging from theft of intellectual property, data, and funds to reputational harm and legal consequences.”
Pyongyang has been increasingly using sophisticated techniques to fool potential employers, including hijacked LinkedIn profiles, stolen tech workers’ identities, and fake degrees from American universities to impersonate real software engineers, according to Amazon’s security chief.
“Their objective is typically straightforward: get hired, get paid, and funnel wages back to fund the regime’s weapons programs,” Schmidt wrote in his post.
“We’ve stopped more than 1,800 suspected DPRK operatives from joining since April 2024,” Schmidt noted, adding, “We’ve detected 27% more DPRK-affiliated applications quarter over quarter this year.”
The 27% increase in fraudulent applications indicates a growing trend. Amazon uses a combination of AI-powered screening and manual verification to detect suspicious job applications by analyzing for links to high-risk institutions, geographic inconsistencies, and anomalies in credentials, according to Schmidt.
The U.S. Justice Department uncovered 29 illegal laptop farms across 16 states in June, after a woman in Arizona received an eight-year prison sentence in May for running a scheme that illegally generated more than $17 million in revenue for North Korea by inserting agents into 300 American tech firms.
“These schemes target and steal from U.S. companies and are designed to evade sanctions and fund the North Korean regime’s illicit programs, including its weapons programs,” Assistant Attorney General John A. Eisenberg of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said in a press statement following the June investigation.
Schmidt emphasized that these schemes are becoming widespread across the tech industry and urged other companies to strengthen their identity verification practices
“We’ve also identified networks where people hand over access to their accounts in exchange for payment,” he added.
“Small details give them away,” Schmidt advised, and he added that other tech firms should regularly watch out for common signs of fraud, including fake phone numbers and inconsistent education histories.
Schmidt noted that Amazon’s long experience with handling large-scale cyber risks “gives us unique visibility into how these operations evolve and a responsibility to share what we’re learning.”
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