[HN] FBI says North Korea deployed thousands of IT workers to get remote jobs in US

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Thousands of information technology workers contracting with US companies have for years secretly sent millions of dollars of their wages to North Korea for use in its ballistic missile program, FBI and Department of Justice officials said.

Court documents allege that the government of North Korea dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the US and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees.

The Justice Department in recent years has sought to expose and disrupt a broad variety of criminal schemes aimed at bolstering the North Korean regime, including its nuclear weapons program.

Two years ago, the Justice Department charged three North Korean computer programmers and members of the government's military intelligence agency with a broad range of global hacks that officials say were carried out at the behest of the regime.

Law enforcement officials said at the time that the prosecution highlighted the profit-driven motive behind North Korea's criminal hacking, a contrast from other adversarial nations like Russia, China, and Iran that are generally more interested in espionage, intellectual property theft or even disrupting democracy.

The panel of experts said in a report that the hackers used increasingly sophisticated techniques to gain access to digital networks involved in cyber finance and to steal information that could be useful in North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs from governments, individuals, and companies.

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