Leak Reveals the Workaday Lives of North Korean IT Scammers

Job hunting is a fresh kind of hell. Hours are wasted sifting through open roles, tweaking cover letters, dealing with obtuse recruiters—and that’s all before you get started with potential interviews. Arguably, some of the world’s most prolific job applicants—or at least most persistent—are those of North Korea’s sprawling IT worker schemes. For years, Kim Jong Un’s repressive regime has successfully sent skilled coders abroad where they’re tasked with finding remote work and sending money back to the heavily sanctioned and isolated nation. Each year, thousands of IT workers bring in somewhere between $250 million and $600 million, according to United Nations estimates.

Now an apparent huge new trove of data, obtained by a cybersecurity researcher, sheds new light on how one group of alleged North Korean IT workers has been running its operations and the meticulous planning involved in the money-making schemes. Money made by scam IT workers contributes to North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction development efforts and ballistic missile programs, the US government has said. Emails, spreadsheets, documents, and chat messages from Google, Github, and Slack accounts allegedly linked to the alleged North Korean scammers show how they track potential jobs, log their ongoing applications, and record earnings with a painstaking attention to detail.

The cache of data, which represents a glimpse into the workaday life of some of North Korea’s IT workers, also purportedly includes fake IDs that may be used for job applications, as well as example cover letters, details of laptop farms, and manuals used to create online accounts. It reinforces how reliant upon US-based tech services, such as Google, Slack, and GitHub, the DPRK workers are.

“I think this is the first time to see their internal [operations], how they are working,” says the security researcher, who uses the handle SttyK and asked not to be named due to privacy and security concerns. SttyK, who is presenting their findings at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today, says an unnamed confidential source provided them with the data from the online accounts. “There are several dozen gigabytes worth of data. There are thousands of emails,” says SttyK, who showed WIRED their presentation ahead of the conference.

North Korea’s IT workers have, in recent years, infiltrated huge Fortune 500 companies, a host of tech and crypto firms, and countless small businesses. While not all IT worker teams use the same approaches, they often use fake or stolen identities to get work and also use facilitators who help cover their digital tracks. The IT workers are often based in Russia or China and are given more freedom and liberties—they’ve been seen enjoying pool parties and dining out on expensive steak dinners—than millions of North Koreans who are not afforded basic human rights. One North Korean defector who operated as an IT worker recently told the BBC that 85 percent of their ill-gained earnings were sent to North Korea. “It’s still much better than when we were in North Korea,” they said.

Multiple screenshots of spreadsheets in the data obtained by SttyK show a cluster of IT workers that appear to be split into 12 groups—each with around a dozen members—and an overall “master boss.” The spreadsheets are methodologically put together to track jobs and budgets: They have summary and analysis tabs that drill down into the data for each group. Rows and columns are neatly filled out; they appear to be updated and maintained regularly.

The tables show the potential target jobs for IT workers. One sheet, which seemingly includes daily updates, lists job descriptions (“need a new react and web3 developer”), the companies advertising them, and their locations. It also links to the vacancies on freelance websites or contact details for those conducting the hiring. One “status” column says whether they are “waiting” or if there has been “contact.”

Screenshots of one spreadsheet seen by WIRED appears to list the potential real-world names of the IT workers themselves. Alongside each name is a register of the make and model of computer they allegedly have, as well as monitors, hard drives, and serial numbers for each device. The “master boss,” who does not have a name listed, is apparently using a 34-inch monitor and two 500GB hard drives.

One “analysis” page in the data seen by SttyK, the security researcher, shows a list of types of work the group of fraudsters are involved in: AI, blockchain, web scraping, bot development, mobile app and web development, trading, CMS development, desktop app development, and “others.” Each category has a potential budget listed and a “total paid” field. A dozen graphs in one spreadsheet claim to track how much they have been paid, the most lucrative regions to make money from, and whether getting paid weekly, monthly, or as a fixed sum is the most successful.

“It’s professionally run,” says Michael “Barni” Barnhart, a leading North Korean hacking and threat researcher who works for insider threat security firm DTEX. “Everyone has to make their quotas. Everything needs to be jotted down. Everything needs to be noted,” he says. The researcher adds that he has seen similar levels of record keeping with North Korea’s sophisticated hacking groups, which have stolen billions in cryptocurrency in recent years, and are largely separate to IT worker schemes. Barnhart has viewed the data obtained by SttyK and says it overlaps with what he and other researchers were tracking.

“I do think this data is very real,” says Evan Gordenker, a consulting senior manager at the Unit 42 threat intelligence team of cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, who has also seen the data SttyK obtained. Gordenker says the firm had been tracking multiple accounts in the data and that one of the prominent GitHub accounts was previously exposing the IT workers’ files publicly. None of the DPRK-linked email addresses responded to WIRED’s requests for comment.

GitHub removed three developer accounts after WIRED got in touch, with Raj Laud, the company’s head of cybersecurity and online safety, saying they have been suspended in line with its “spam and inauthentic activity” rules. “The prevalence of such nation-state threat activity is an industry-wide challenge and a complex issue that we take seriously,” Laud says.

Google declined to comment on specific accounts WIRED provided, citing policies around account privacy and security. “We have processes and policies in place to detect these operations and report them to law enforcement,” says Mike Sinno, director of detection and response at Google. “These processes include taking action against fraudulent activity, proactively notifying targeted organizations, and working with public and private partnerships to share threat intelligence that strengthens defenses against these campaigns.”

“We have strict policies in place that prohibit the use of Slack by sanctioned individuals or entities, and we take swift action when we identify activity that violates these rules,” says Allen Tsai, senior director of corporate communications at Slack’s parent company Salesforce. “We cooperate with law enforcement and relevant authorities as required by law and do not comment on specific accounts or ongoing investigations.”

Another spreadsheet also lists members as being part of a “unit” called “KUT,” a potential abbreviation of North Korea’s Kim Chaek University of Technology, which has been cited in US government warnings about DPRK-linked IT workers. One column in the spreadsheet also lists “ownership” as “Ryonbong,” likely referring to defense company Korea Ryonbong General Corporation, which has been sanctioned by the US since 2005 and UN since 2009. “The vast majority of them [IT workers] are subordinate to and working on behalf of entities directly involved in the DPRK’s UN-prohibited WMD and ballistic missile programs, as well as its advanced conventional weapons development and trade sectors,” the US Treasury Department said in a May 2022 report.

Across the myriad of IT worker-linked GitHub and LinkedIn accounts, CVs, and portfolio websites that researchers have identified in recent years, there are often distinct patterns. Email addresses and accounts use the same names; CVs can look identical. “Reusing resume content is also something that we’ve seen frequently across their profiles,” says Benjamin Racenberg, a senior researcher who has tracked North Korean IT worker personas at cybersecurity firm Nisos. Racenberg says the scammers are increasingly adopting AI for image manipulation, video calls, and as part of scripts they use. “For portfolio websites, we’ve seen them use templates and use the same template over and over again,” Racenberg says.

That all points to some day-to-day drudgery for the IT workers tasked with running the criminal schemes for the Kim regime. “It’s a lot of copy and paste,” Unit 42’s Gordenker says. One suspected IT worker Gordenker has tracked was spotted using 119 identities. “He Googles Japanese name generators—spelled wrong of course—and then over the course of about four hours, just fills out spreadsheets just full of names and potential places [to target].”

The detailed documentation also serves another purpose, though: tracking the IT workers and their actions. “There’s a lot of moving parts once the money gets into the actual hands of leadership, so they're going to need accurate numbers,” DTEX’s Barnhart says. Employee monitoring software has been seen on the scammers’ machines in some instances and researchers claim North Koreans in job interviews won’t answer questions about Kim.

SttyK says they saw dozens of screen recordings in Slack channels showing the workers daily activity. In screenshots of a Slack instance, the “Boss” account sends a message: “@channel: Everyone should try to work more than at least 14 hrs a day.” The next message they sent says: “This time track includes idling time, as you know.”

“Interestingly, their communication has been all English, not Korean,” SttyK says. The researcher, along with others, speculates this may be for a couple of reasons: first, to blend into legitimate activity; and secondly, to help improve their English skills for applications and interviews. Google account data, SttyK says, shows they were frequently using online translation to process messages.

Beyond a glimpse at the ways in which the IT workers track their performance, the data SttyK obtained gives some limited clues about the day-to-day lives of the individual scammers themselves. One spreadsheet lists a volleyball tournament the IT workers apparently had planned; in Slack channels, they celebrated birthdays and shared inspirational memes from a popular Instagram account. In some screen recordings, SttyK says, they can be seen playing Counter-Strike. “I felt there was a strong unity among the members,” SttyK says.