North Korean Operatives Earning Foreign Currency... "Even Fake Employment at US and Japanese IT Companies"

North Korea Holds Over 7,000 Cyber Agents
Disguised Employment to Fund Nuclear and Missile Development

A North Korean cyber attack agent who infiltrated IT companies in the United States and Japan by falsifying nationality as a technician has been caught. This appears to be one of North Korea's methods for earning foreign currency.

Japan's Sankei Shimbun reported on the 28th of last month that "a North Korean IT technician disguised as a Korean last year was found to have been in charge of modifying a disaster prevention application in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, through a police investigation."

Japanese police estimated that the North Korean technician's application work was part of North Korea's foreign currency earning business. The newspaper reported, "North Korea seems to be earning hundreds of millions of dollars annually by assigning tasks to cyber agents based in Southeast Asia and other locations."

Cyber agents are generally known to keep about 10% of their income for themselves and send the remaining 90% to North Korea. Among them, some earn more than $300,000 (about 400 million KRW) annually, which is over ten times the income of typical North Korean overseas dispatched workers.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

U.S. CNN also reported that an entrepreneur running a cryptocurrency-related business in San Francisco was informed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last year that an IT technician at his company was a North Korean operative. This cyber agent also worked disguised as a Chinese person and had been sending tens of thousands of dollars in monthly salary to North Korea.

Currently, North Korea has about 7,000 cyber agents. They are usually selected from elementary and middle schools and trained as cyber agents at universities or operational institutions. After their 20s, they are dispatched to overseas bases disguised as trading companies, where they conduct operations such as cyber terrorism and confidential information gathering. The United Nations and others report that North Korea earns funds necessary for nuclear and missile development through illegal cyber activities such as hacking and virtual asset theft.

U.S. blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis stated in its '2023 Cryptocurrency Crime Report' published on the 1st that "the virtual currency stolen by North Korean hackers last year amounted to $1.65 billion (about 2.18 trillion KRW)." This accounts for 40% of the virtual currency stolen worldwide last year.