15-07-2025
How North Korea infiltrates its IT experts into Western companies
When Iqlusion, an American cryptocurrency start-up, needed developers in 2021, it hired "Jun Kai" and "Sarawut Sanit." These two experts worked remotely, supposedly from Singapore. "I talked to them almost every day for a year. They did the work. And I was, frankly, pretty pleased," said Zaki Manian, co-founder of Iqlusion, in an interview with the specialist website Coindesk. Several months after they left, the company's founder received a message from the FBI: The cryptocurrency wallets used for their salary payments were linked to the North Korean regime.
Iqlusion, like hundreds of other companies before it, unknowingly hired remote coders tasked with infiltrating businesses under a fake name and nationality, so they could earn salaries that were then almost entirely paid to the North Korean state.
While this phenomenon is not new – the United Nations Security Council first mentioned it in 2019 – until recently, it primarily affected American companies. But over recent months, experts have observed "an increase in operations in Europe," according to a report from Mandiant published in April. Developers have recently been hired for French projects, John Hultquist, chief analyst at this Google subsidiary, told Le Monde in late 2024.
