How North Koreans Infiltrated the Crypto Industry to Fund the Regime - Ep. 715
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What I'm concerned about is that this has been going on for years years years, and I really do think it's incumbent upon every crypto protocol to, if they're not sure and if they haven't done an audit and a specific audit with an eye to these sorts of problems, do that audit and make sure their code is safe because it's very possible that some of these exploits, whether it be malware on a personal machine, whether it be a tainted smart contract, has laid dormant for a very long time and just hasn't been attacked. That doesn't mean that the attack isn't, you know, ready ready to happen.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of the Cryptopians. I started covering crypto 9 years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes, was the 1st mainstream reporters to cover cryptocurrency full time. This is the October 8, 2024 episode of Unchained. Polkadot is the original and leading layer 0 blockchain with over 2,000 plus developers. And the Polkadot 2.0 upgrade will be a massive accelerator for the ecosystem, making it faster, more secure, and adaptable. Perfect for GameFi and DeFi to build, grow, and scale. Join t
for having us. Yeah.
Excited to to talk about this.
Sam, you published a bombshell of an article last week about how North Korean IT workers are infiltrating the crypto industry. Can you tell us what you found? Yeah.
Thanks for calling out a bombshell. And, also, thanks. I mean, this is the first time I've talked to Taylor, you know, face to face since this all happened, and she was a great source for this article too, which is why I'm excited for this conversation. But long story short, for a while now, you know, at least since 2018, we found in our article, in our investigation, North Korean IT workers have been using fake identities, resumes, and so on to infiltrate essentially tech companies, namely crypto companies, which was the focus of this article, to extract revenues that get sent back to Pyongya
And how widespread is this in the crypto industry? And
that was the the, I guess, the bombshell part that you were referring to. It's it's quite widespread. So in this article, we named I I don't know the exact number that we ultimately named. There are around a dozen, but Taylor knows even more examples. I think I individually, independently identified 12 examples of companies in the crypto industry that have unwittingly hired these North Korean developers who said they're from Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, the United States, Canada, and so on. And they were some big companies too, which is, you know, part of what this investigation sought out to t
I know. It was it was quite eye opening. So, Taylor, as Sam mentioned, you've also published frequently on North Korean workers infiltrating crypto over the years. And you have some really crazy stories with screenshots of whole conversations that devs have had with North Koreans and all kinds of things. But, yeah, why don't you just explain what it is that you've found over the years?
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