Infiltrated From Within

Why Hiring, Identity, and Trust Have Become the New Cyber Perimeter

For more than a decade, cybersecurity strategy has focused almost exclusively on keeping attackers outside the organization. We invested in firewalls, endpoint protection, identity platforms, and SOC modernization. We drew clean diagrams. We adopted Zero Trust—at least on paper.

And yet, one of the most effective adversarial campaigns in recent years did not rely on exploits, malware, or zero-days. It relied on something far simpler: getting hired.

What began as a documented North Korean state-sponsored employment fraud operation has revealed a much broader and more troubling reality. Western organizations have lost discipline around who we hire, what access we grant by default, and how much operational knowledge we expose simply because someone holds an employee badge.

This is no longer theoretical. By 2025, it became operationally undeniable.

From Pyongyang to Payroll: How the North Korean IT Worker Scheme Worked

North Korea did not breach Western companies in the traditional sense. It onboarded into them.