A North Korean imposter was uncovered, working as a sysadmin at Amazon U.S., after their keystroke input lag raised suspicions with security specialists at the online retail giant. Normally, a U.S.-based remote worker’s computer would send keystroke data within tens of milliseconds. This suspicious individual’s keyboard lag was “more than 110 milliseconds,” reports Bloomberg.
Amazon is commendably proactive in its pursuit of impostors, according to the source report. The news site talked with Amazon’s Chief Security Officer, Stephen Schmidt, about this fascinating new case of North Koreans trying to infiltrate U.S. organizations to raise hard currency for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and sometimes indulge in espionage and/or sabotage.
It kinda is, its practically a requirement for a lot of corporate espionage and a lot of spies have entire lives alongside their spy duties. Also fun joke I’ve heard about Vladivostok during the Cold war, “There were surprisingly only a handful of people in that city, American spies, Soviet counter intelligence, smugglers, cargo movers, and baristas who ignored the whole mess” heard that from an ex-CIA guy who was doing a talk at a spy exhibit back when I was a kid.
so? does working a job == espionage because it’s north korea? i don’t think they have ever gone at war or any kind of open conflict with western countries at all recently excluding the thing with south korea and the us not liking their existence…?
why are their workers totally all spies as opposed to say, chinese ones, which might even have a stronger interest in keeping an eye on the west? and they don’t seem to have much issue with them.
as i said to me, it sounds like weasel language to smear this specific country for trying to get around the sanctions imposed on them.
The Norks have quite literally done data breaches and major hacks via this exact method in the past. They basically have nothing to lose on the international level so they do this and then trade it to countries like China or Russia for whatever it is they want. If they didn’t have a documented history of doing shit like that nobody would assume espionage.
If they didn’t have a known tendency towards weird espionage shit going back to the 50 and 60s nobody would care, but they do have a known tendency towards doing weird espionage shit.