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

Companies who hired them are firing them faster.

But the quotas remain, and so do the regime's financial expectations.

The punishment for workers who fail, for their families, it's still there.

And that's where the danger lies.

Because if the paycheck disappears, something else will have to get monetized.

And incident responders, they're seeing that shift.

Here's Charles again.

Things changed in 2024 as more and more companies disclosed that there were North Korean IT worker problems.

And as companies became more aware of the problem,

they started doing a much better job of blocking and finding these North Korean IT workers.

And so the problem for the IT workers is that years ago, they would hold a job for a year or two years, and they would have multiple jobs.

Now, we're in the second half of 2024, they struggled to hold jobs.

They might have gotten a job for a few days and then somebody noticed that something was going on and then they were terminated.

And so they needed to find a way to supplement their income.

And for a very small number of our cases, under a dozen, we saw that there was some element of extortion by the North Korean IT worker.

The individuals who were terminated would tell their supervisors that if you don't pay me my sign-on bonus, I'm going to take all this data that I got access to through my job, and I'm going to publish it on the internet.

We didn't actually see the publication of the data, but we saw the threats.

Fast forward, we saw more and more aggressiveness by these IT workers demanding money.

And in the most egregious case that we saw, we saw a brand new persona send emails to a number of victim organizations saying, I've hacked into your network, I've stolen your data, here's a sample of the data that I stole.

And in those investigations, what we found was that that sample of data exactly matched the information that a suspected North Korean IT worker had taken six months prior.

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