Steve Schmidt, the chief security officer at Amazon, says his team has identified and blocked more than 1,800 attempts by North Korea to secure IT roles at the tech giant. He warns that this scheme is becoming more prevalent across the technology industry as the nation-state actor targets the lucrative salaries of generative artificial intelligence and machine learning jobs, and the troves of valuable data such workers have access to.
“A lot of people don’t think about organized efforts by other parties to get people hired into organizations who have interesting data,” says Schmidt, speaking at an event held by Amazon this week. “It’s actually pretty prolific.”
Schmidt says that in 2025, Amazon has seen a 27% increase in the number of North Korean applications on a quarter-over-quarter basis.
Notable cases throughout the year that point to the growing issue include four North Korean nationals being charged for allegedly scheming to get hired as remote IT workers and then steal nearly $1 million in cryptocurrency; a campaign to create a fake job-application platform to get hired at major AI companies; and a woman in Arizona who was sentenced to eight years in prison for her role in a $17 million scam to help North Koreans steal U.S. identities to secure remote IT roles.
