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

North Korea's operators began targeting centralized exchanges, the Coinbases and Binances of the world.

Think of these exchanges as an E-trade or stock brokerage for cryptocurrency, places where people can buy, sell, and store digital assets.

Coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange platform.

The idea being interacting with a blockchain can be a little bit challenging and complex for individuals who are not very well versed in that ecosystem.

So Coinbase made it easy to sort of send and receive funds, convert traditional fiat currency like US dollars into things like Bitcoin, as well as interact with sort of other blockchains and not have to deal with the underlying complexity of doing things like figuring out how to safely store Bitcoin.

Ergo, a crypto exchange's wallet is the whale of all whales.

Now, exchanges are a little bit more complicated to exploit than one person's crypto wallet.

As an added security feature, larger exchanges tend to use something called a multi-signature wallet or multi-sig in industry slang.

It basically means there's a set number of authorized keys to approve a transaction before it can go through.

And a certain number of those keys must authorize any transaction, i.e.

four of seven signer keys must sign off or seven of 10.

So the DPRK starts going after anyone they think might have privileged access in an exchange, hoping to find people with specialized access to these keys.

And they do this the same way they've done everything else.

Social engineering.

They pose as security auditors, VCs looking to make an investment, headhunters, so many headhunters.

That particular approach got a name.

It's now known as the Contagious Interview Campaign.

Here's Heidi Wilder again.

Workers at these crypto exchanges start getting hit en masse with these fake job offers, often for ridiculous sums.

Here's Aaron Lloyd, a cybersecurity expert who specializes in blockchain technology.

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