North Korean agents are trying to infiltrate Amazon, chief security officer says

Hundreds of job applications from suspected North Korean operatives have been blocked by Amazon, according to the U.S. tech giant's chief security officer.

Hundreds of job applications from suspected North Korean operatives have been blocked by Amazon, according to the U.S. tech giant's chief security officer, amid growing concerns over cyber scams connected to Pyongyang.

“Their objective is typically straightforward: get hired, get paid, and funnel wages back to fund the regime’s weapons programs,” Stephen Schmidt wrote in a LinkedIn post on Friday, adding that applicants were using fake or stolen identities to pursue remote IT jobs in the U.S. and worldwide.

“We’ve stopped more than 1,800 suspected DPRK operatives from joining since April 2024,” he said, using the acronym for the secretive communist state’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “We’ve detected 27% more DPRK-affiliated applications quarter over quarter this year,” he added.

The fraud was detected by Amazon's AI-powered application screening system combined with manual verification by its staff, he said.

Schmidt said that the agents often use so-called “laptop farms” — computers physically based in the U.S. but operated remotely from abroad — to conceal their true locations.