Nicole Perlroth

speaker

1,851 appearances 14 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 14 Jul

Nicole Perlroth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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To Catch a Thief: North Korea On Our Payroll · Ep. 5: The Heists · 7 Jul 2026 podcast

And the man who escorted him was named Park Kyung-mu, and he posed as Kim Jong-un's father.

So this is another man who was executed by Kim Jong-un, somebody who he spent his childhood with.

But I kind of wonder about what kind of a person would kill the man who posed as his father for some slight or embezzlement or something.

These vendettas extend from politically motivated to purely petty.

Kim Jong-un is a big wine drinker, imports a lot of wine for himself into North Korea, got upset at a wine distributor based in China related to some wine distribution deal, and in August decided to just wipe out their network.

That's Eric Chen, who leads a team of reverse engineers at Broadcom.

He spent years dissecting the code behind North Korea's biggest hacks.

But in terms of its cyber vendettas, North Korea learned something fundamental after Sony.

Destructive cyber attacks make headlines.

Financial cyber attacks make money.

Here's Ari Redbird, who heads up global policy at TRM Labs and before that led financial and terrorism investigations at Treasury.

You know, in the Sony Pictures context was, hey, we could create disruption or maybe we could steal usernames and passwords on the Internet to all of a sudden, wow, we can actually steal money that we can launder and use.

And that same tradecraft you use to wipe a company off the map, you can use it to rob a bank.

I'm Nicole Perleroth, and this is To Catch a Thief.

Sony began with something simple, a spear phishing email.

But what North Korea perfected in that attack was far more dangerous, the ability to quietly learn a network, map it from the inside, find the crown jewels, then weaponize them for maximum impact.

And while we were still reeling from Sony, North Korea's hackers turned that same playbook on banks, and one bank in particular, the Bank of Bangladesh.

Here's Eric Chen again.

Way back in January of 2015, North Korean attackers were creating personas, creating email accounts, and conducting online research about email addresses and Bangladesh bank employees.

they started sending friendly job inquiries to the bank's employees, along with a link to a resume and cover letter.

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