Nicole Perlroth

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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. 6: The North Korea Model · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

Second, if we had a state like North Korea that was helping the Russians, cleaning out cryptocurrency wallets,

engaging in high-scale cyber fraud, conducting operations like Sony, but that it didn't have nuclear weapons.

Do you think that we would be treating them with such kid gloves?

I don't think so.

When I first started digging into North Korea's IT worker scheme, there was an odd comfort in believing these workers were mostly there for the paycheck.

Yes, the salaries still funded North Korean nukes, but at least the workers themselves didn't appear to have a more destructive mission.

At least that's how investigators understood it then.

Here's Mandiant's chief technology officer, Charles Carmichael.

My initial assumption was that these actors had to have been doing something malicious.

We knew that they had access to production code, production systems.

We knew that they had the ability to insert back doors into a variety of things.

And we very deliberately looked for evidence of that malicious activity, and we found none of it over hundreds of investigations.

And what we assessed was that these actors are just collecting a paycheck.

But as more companies grew wise to this scheme, they've started hunting for North Koreans in their workforce.

And the good news is, they're finding them.

Companies are starting to look for signals we've surfaced throughout this series.

Inconsistent identities, coached interviews, strange login patterns, laptop farms, a last-minute change of address, keystroke latency, and workers who don't quite match the person they claim to be on camera.

And that is where Rob Joyce, the former head of NSA's Cybersecurity Directorate, told me defenders may actually be reclaiming the advantage.

At companies across America, cybersecurity teams are on the hunt for red flags and behavioral tells.

But as companies screen for these red flags, North Koreans are landing fewer jobs.

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