Federal authorities announced the seizure of $1.5 million and 17 domain names as part of the investigation, which is ongoingThousands of information technology workers contracting with U.S. companies have for years secretly sent millions of dollars of their wages tothat IT workers dispatched and contracted by North Korea to work remotely with companies in St. Louis and elsewhere in the U.S. have been using false identities to get the jobs.
A New Zealand tourist remembers the moment an American soldier ran across the heavily-fortified border between South Korea and North Korea. “At a minimum, the FBI recommends that employers take additional proactive steps with remote IT workers to make it harder for bad actors to hide their identities," Greenberg said in a news release.
North Korea also uses workers in other fields to funnel money back for the weapons program, Hultquist said, but higher pay for tech workers provides a more lucrative resource. The IT workers generated millions of dollars a year in their wages to benefit North Korea's weapons programs. In some instances, the North Korean workers also infiltrated computer networks and stole information from the companies that hired them, the Justice Department said. They also maintained access for future hacking and extortion schemes, the agency said.
The Justice Department in recent years has sought to expose and disrupt a broad variety of criminal schemes aimed at bolstering the North Korean regime, including its nuclear weapons program.