A top Amazon executive revealed that the company has blocked more than 1,800 job applications from suspected North Korean agents. Amazon’s Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt said in a LinkedIn post that North Koreans tried to apply for remote working IT jobs using stolen or fake identities.
“Their objective is typically straightforward: get hired, get paid, and funnel wages back to fund the regime’s weapons programs,” he said, adding that this trend is likely to be happening at scale across the industry, especially in the U.S. Authorities in the U.S. and South Korea have issued warnings about Pyongyang’s operatives carrying out online scams.
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Schmidt mentioned that Amazon has seen a nearly one-third increase in job applications from North Koreans in the past year. He said that the operatives typically work with people managing “laptop farms” — computers in the U.S. run remotely from outside the country. He also added that the company used a combination of artificial intelligence tools and verification by its staff to screen job applications.
“Bad actors are hijacking dormant LinkedIn accounts using leaked credentials to gain verification. They target genuine software engineers to appear credible,” Schmidt said, urging firms to report suspicious job applications to the authorities.
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Schmidt also warned employees to look for these fraudulent applications. Some indicators of those could be incorrectly formatted phone numbers and mismatched education histories. The U.S. government said in June that it had uncovered 29 “laptop farms” that were being operated illegally across the country by North Korean IT workers. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), they used stolen or forged identities of Americans to help North Korean nationals get jobs in the U.S. It also indicted U.S. brokers who had helped secure jobs for the North Korean operatives.
A woman in Arizona was sentenced to more than eight years in jail in June, for running a laptop farm to help North Korean IT workers secure remote jobs at more than 300 U.S. companies.
According to the DOJ, the scheme generated more than $17 million in illicit gains for her and Pyongyang.
Amazon recently made a number of job cuts. Last week, it filed a new notice with Washington state on Monday, saying it is cutting 84 jobs. This is in addition to the unrelated 14,000 corporate layoffs it announced in October.