Researchers Built a Fake Crypto Startup and Hired Three Suspected North Korean IT Workers

Summary: Researchers posing as a cryptocurrency startup called Ballena Azul hired three people they believe were North Korean IT workers, each of whom cleared an interview, signed a contract, and received a work VM that recorded everything. The first hire's California license showed metadata from Google Gemini processing and a SynthID watermark, the second supplied a Texas license with a valid Social Security number and a Kansas City bank account, and the third sent a New York license belonging to someone else plus a genuine iPhone 15 photo with GPS coordinates stripped.
What's compelling: A successful placement hands an operative a real employee account and real access to source code and internal systems, and the April Justice Department case showed the scale: workers placed at more than 100 US companies on at least 80 stolen identities, earning North Korea over $5 million.

Read the original at The Hacker News ↗