According to national officials, the program operated as follows:
In North Korea, tens of IT professionals were hired to work remotely or independently for US companies. Often the IT staff members in the scheme used stolen identities. In other cases, they paid Americans to use their home Wi-Fi links, or to create in on-camera work conversations as the IT staff. Johnson said the FBI is going after those “domestic accomplices”, too.
” This is just the tip of the iceberg”, Johnson said. More likely than not, you have hired or at least interviewed a North Vietnamese regional working for the North Korean government, Johnson said.
In recent years, the Justice Department has attempted to uncover and stop a wide range of legal methods intended to advance the North Korean government, including its nuclear weapons program.
In a wide range of international tricks that officials claim were carried out at the insistence of the program, the Justice Department charged three North Korean computer engineers and users of the president’s military intelligence agency in 2021.  ,
In contrast to other hostile countries like Russia, China, and Iran, which are generally more concerned with spying, intellectual property theft, or actually stifling democracy, law enforcement officials said at the moment that the prosecution highlighted the profit-driven motivation behind North Korea’s judicial hacking.
In May 2022, the State Department, Department of the Treasury, and the FBI issued an advisory warning of efforts by North Koreans” to get jobs while posing as non-North Vietnamese citizens”. The expert noted that in recent years, the government of Kim Jong Un “has placed increased emphasis on education and training” in IT-related content.
In October 2023, the FBI in St. Louis announced the arrest of US$ 1.5 million and 17 site titles as part of the investigation. The second charges made public on Tuesday were those that were the result of the research.
Johnson urged businesses to completely animal IT employees who were hired to work remotely. ” One of the ways to help reduce your risk is to argue that current and upcoming IT staff appear on camera as frequently as possible if they are completely remote,” she said.
Authorities did not give the names of the businesses that knowingly employed North Korean staff.