In June last year, the US Justice Department announced a clampdown on a North Korean hacking campaign. North Korean citizens had infiltrated US companies by fraudulently gaining employment as remote workers, in an attempt to earn money and steal data for the country’s authoritarian regime. According to the US government, the perpetrators used the stolen identities of more than 80 American citizens across over 100 companies to get the jobs and carry out the attack, generating more than $5mn in illicit revenue for the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), which faces UN sanctions. As part of the crackdown, eight US-based individuals were also sentenced in recent months for hosting so-called “laptop farms” — a physical collection of laptops in a US residence, which allows fake employees to appear as if they are in America when they are in fact operating from overseas.

Full report : How “synthetic insider” attacks raise the stakes for corporate cyber defense; a Verizon analysis of ~22K incidents found 12% were carried out by internal actors.