Just when we thought we had something special with our very own North Korean hacker, it turns out this type of fraud has made it to the Volunteer State.
A recent arrest in Nashville, Tennessee is just another example of this global tactic finding its way into U.S. organizations. Fortunately, the authorities caught up with this one.
According to the tech news site Cyberscoop, authorities arrested a 38-year-old man for allegedly getting himself hired by U.S. and British companies under false identities.
“The indictment, unsealed in the Middle District of Tennessee, details a complex operation where Knoot allegedly used stolen identities to obtain remote work for North Korean nationals, who were masquerading as U.S. citizens.“
The man, Matthew Isaac Knoot, faces multiple charges, including conspiracy to damage protected computers and money laundering, carrying a maximum potential sentence of 20 years in prison if convicted.
Cyberscoop continues:
“The recurrence of these North Korean-led remote work schemes has been a problem for both the U.S. government and the cybersecurity industry. In May, the Justice Department charged an Arizona woman in a similar scheme that defrauded over 300 U.S. companies through U.S.-based payment platforms, online job site accounts, and proxy computers. In July, security awareness training company KnowBe4 revealed that it had discovered and removed a newly hired software engineer on its internal IT team after it realized it was actually a persona controlled by a North Korean threat actor.”
Our post about our own saga with this sort of fraud and our accompanying FAQ seem to have come at a pretty opportune time. We encourage you to use our story and those like it to spread the word about these IT worker scams far and wide.
KnowBe4 empowers your workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Over 65,000 organizations worldwide trust the KnowBe4 platform to strengthen their security culture and reduce human risk.
Cyberscoop has the story, plus a link to the unsealed indictment.
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