By Nathan Ferguson
The United States Treasury Department and the Department of Justice released a mutual advisory caution against the mounting number of workers from North Korea in diverse jobs related to freelance technology, particularly in the industry of cryptocurrency. The release of the public advisory took place on Friday, indicating the crucial red flags as well as identifiers for non-governmental companies to stay away from appointing workers from North Korea.
The agencies from the United States cautioned that the respective workers present a series of hazards taking into account the theft of funds, data, and intellectual property that could be utilized to infringe sanctions. A substantial increase has been witnessed in the market for freelance jobs because of the pandemic. Crypto, having a status of a decentralized space, provides a few of the significantly profitable IT-based jobs in the present industry.
This counts to be a cause at the back of the apprehension of the U.S. agencies regarding the escalating interest of the North Korean nation in the respective sector. It was noted by the advisory that the workers from North Korea frequently utilize VPNs (virtual private networks) to buy the IP addresses related to a third-party country as well as stolen identities so to conceal the origin country.
The advisory also mentioned that the workers develop software and applications dealing with a variety of sectors, taking into account but not restricted to, lifestyle, entertainment, sports, social networking, cryptocurrency, as well as business. To detect as well as to cast out these workers from the firms based in the United States, diverse red flags were listed on the behalf of the advisory to be cautious of.
These aspects include inconsistencies in nationality, name spelling, contact information, asserted work location, work history, and educational history along with many other details witnessed on the developers’ profiles on the freelance venues. Requests related to the transaction of funds to the banks based in the People’s Republic of China as well as crypto payments were also mentioned as the other crucial red flags that were listed in the respective advisory.
Extreme notoriety has been achieved by North Korea in stealing funds via diverse hacks and ransomware attacks along with having a position of being among the most prominent hacking groups with its own, named Lazarus. The latest hack of Ronin Bridge of the Axie Infinity that witnessed a loss of more than $600M worth of cryptocurrency was additionally had some association with the very hacking group.