A North Korean Hacker Tricked a US Safety Vendor Into Hiring Him—and Instantly Tried to Hack Them

KnowBe4, a US-based safety vendor, revealed that it unwittingly employed a North Korean hacker who tried to load malware into the corporate’s community. KnowBe4 CEO and founder Stu Sjouwerman described the incident in a weblog publish this week, calling it a cautionary story that was fortuitously detected earlier than inflicting any main issues.

“To start with: No unlawful entry was gained, and no information was misplaced, compromised, or exfiltrated on any KnowBe4 programs,” Sjouwerman wrote. “This isn’t a knowledge breach notification, there was none. See it as an organizational studying second I’m sharing with you. If it could actually occur to us, it could actually occur to virtually anybody. Do not let it occur to you.”

KnowBe4 stated it was on the lookout for a software program engineer for its inner IT AI crew. The agency employed an individual who, it seems, was from North Korea and was “utilizing a sound however stolen US-based id” and a photograph that was “enhanced” by synthetic intelligence. There’s now an lively FBI investigation amid suspicion that the employee is what KnowBe4’s weblog publish known as “an Insider Risk/Nation State Actor.”

KnowBe4 operates in 11 international locations and is headquartered in Florida. It gives safety consciousness coaching, together with phishing safety assessments, to company prospects. For those who sometimes obtain a faux phishing electronic mail out of your employer, you may be working for an organization that makes use of the KnowBe4 service to check its staff’ capability to identify scams.

Individual Handed Background Verify and Video Interviews

KnowBe4 employed the North Korean hacker via its regular course of. “We posted the job, obtained résumés, carried out interviews, carried out background checks, verified references, and employed the individual. We despatched them their Mac workstation, and the second it was obtained, it instantly began to load malware,” the corporate stated.

Despite the fact that the photograph offered to HR was faux, the one that was interviewed for the job apparently regarded sufficient prefer it to move. KnowBe4’s HR crew “carried out 4 video convention based mostly interviews on separate events, confirming the person matched the photograph offered on their utility,” the publish stated. “Moreover, a background verify and all different normal pre-hiring checks had been carried out and got here again clear as a result of stolen id getting used. This was an actual individual utilizing a sound however stolen US-based id. The image was AI ‘enhanced.'”

The 2 pictures on the prime of this story are a inventory photograph and what KnowBe4 says is the AI faux based mostly on the inventory photograph. The inventory photograph is on the left, and the AI faux is on the correct.

The worker, known as “XXXX” within the weblog publish, was employed as a principal software program engineer. The brand new rent’s suspicious actions had been flagged by safety software program, main KnowBe4’s Safety Operations Heart (SOC) to analyze:

On July 15, 2024, a sequence of suspicious actions had been detected on the consumer starting at 9:55 pm EST. When these alerts got here in KnowBe4’s SOC crew reached out to the consumer to inquire in regards to the anomalous exercise and potential trigger. XXXX responded to SOC that he was following steps on his router information to troubleshoot a velocity subject and that it might have prompted a compromise.

The attacker carried out varied actions to control session historical past information, switch doubtlessly dangerous information, and execute unauthorized software program. He used a Raspberry Pi to obtain the malware. SOC tried to get extra particulars from XXXX together with getting him on a name. XXXX acknowledged he was unavailable for a name and later grew to become unresponsive. At round 10:20 pm EST SOC contained XXXX’s machine.

“Pretend IT Employee From North Korea”

The SOC evaluation indicated that the loading of malware “might have been intentional by the consumer,” and the group “suspected he could also be an Insider Risk/Nation State Actor,” the weblog publish stated.

“We shared the collected information with our mates at Mandiant, a number one world cybersecurity skilled, and the FBI, to corroborate our preliminary findings. It seems this was a faux IT employee from North Korea,” Sjouwerman wrote.

KnowBe4 stated it could actually’t present a lot element due to the lively FBI investigation. However the individual employed for the job might have logged into the corporate laptop remotely from North Korea, Sjouwerman defined:

How this works is that the faux employee asks to get their workstation despatched to an handle that’s principally an “IT mule laptop computer farm.” They then VPN in from the place they actually bodily are (North Korea or over the border in China) and work the night time shift in order that they appear to be working in US daytime. The rip-off is that they’re really doing the work, getting paid properly, and provides a big quantity to North Korea to fund their unlawful packages. I haven’t got to inform you in regards to the extreme danger of this. It is good we now have new staff in a extremely restricted space once they begin, and don’t have any entry to manufacturing programs. Our controls caught it, however that was positive a studying second that I’m joyful to share with everybody.

This story initially appeared on Ars Technica.