If this is such a big deal, how come I never heard about this till I saw the WSJ podcast?
The total $ amount she siphoned to NK through her laptop farm : $17 million! (she got to keep about $180k - not bad for a non techie)
Annie Minoff: That is wild to me. Imagine being a North Korean hacker and applying for a job at a cybersecurity company.
Robert McMillan: Yeah. Imagine getting it.
Laptop farmers help make that happen. They receive North Korean's work laptops and help set them up so that the scammers can operate them remotely. They also help with logging on in the morning and logging off at night. And that's what Christina Chapman did. After she got that LinkedIn message, Chapman became one of what researchers estimate could be dozens of laptop farmers who've cropped up all across the US.
Christina Chapman, a 50-year-old ex-waitress and bootcamp graduate coder, posted gleefully about her day-to-day grind on TikTok—giving peeks into her client sessions, lunches, and travels. But in the corner of one 2023 video, federal agents noticed more than a dozen idling laptops. These were not for her own projects—they were used by North Korean IT staff illegally impersonating US-based employees, the Wall Street Journal reported.
https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-stole-your-tech-job-ai-interviews/
Once again, the applicant said they were based in the US, had an Anglo name, and appeared to be a young Asian man with a thick, non-American accent. He used a basic virtual background, was on a terrible internet connection, and had a single-minded focus on salary. This candidate, though, was wearing glasses. In the lenses, Wijckmans spotted the reflection of multiple screens, and he could make out a white chatbox with messages scrolling by. “He was clearly either chatting with somebody or on some AI tool,” Wijckmans remembers.
 |
| From Sherwood News |
No comments:
Post a Comment