KnowBe4, a US-based security vendor, revealed that it unwittingly hired a North Korean hacker who attempted to load malware into the company’s network. KnowBe4 CEO and founder Stu Sjouwerman described the incident in a blog post this week, calling it a cautionary tale that was fortunately detected before causing any major problems.
“First of all: No illegal access was gained, and no data was lost, compromised, or exfiltrated on any KnowBe4 systems,” Sjouwerman wrote. âThis is not a data breach notification, there was none. See it as an organizational learning moment I am sharing with you. If it can happen to us, it can happen to almost anyone. Don’t let it happen to you.â
KnowBe4 said it was looking for a software engineer for its internal IT AI team. The firm hired a person who, it turns out, was from North Korea and was “using a valid but stolen US-based identity” and a photo that was “enhanced” by artificial intelligence. There is now an active FBI investigation amid suspicion that the worker is what KnowBe4’s blog post called “an Insider Threat/Nation State Actor.”
KnowBe4 operates in 11 countries and is headquartered in Florida. It provides security awareness training, including phishing security tests, to corporate customers. If you occasionally receive a fake phishing email from your employer, you might be working for a company that uses the KnowBe4 service to test its employees’ ability to spot scams.
Person Passed Background Check and Video Interviews
KnowBe4 hired the North Korean hacker through its usual process. “We posted the job, received résumés, conducted interviews, performed background checks, verified references, and hired the person. We sent them their Mac workstation, and the moment it was received, it immediately started to load malware,” the company said.
Even though the photo provided to HR was fake, the person who was interviewed for the job apparently looked enough like it to pass. KnowBe4’s HR team “conducted four video conference based interviews on separate occasions, confirming the individual matched the photo provided on their application,” the post said. “Additionally, a background check and all other standard pre-hiring checks were performed and came back clear due to the stolen identity being used. This was a real person using a valid but stolen US-based identity. The picture was AI ‘enhanced.'”
The two images at the top of this story are a stock photo and what KnowBe4 says is the AI fake based on the stock photo. The stock photo is on the left, and the AI fake is on the right.
The employee, referred to as “XXXX” in the blog post, was hired as a principal software engineer. The new hire’s suspicious activities were flagged by security software, leading KnowBe4’s Security Operations Center (SOC) to investigate:
âFake IT Worker From North Koreaâ
The SOC analysis indicated that the loading of malware “may have been intentional by the user,” and the group “suspected he may be an Insider Threat/Nation State Actor,” the blog post said.
“We shared the collected data with our friends at Mandiant, a leading global cybersecurity expert, and the FBI, to corroborate our initial findings. It turns out this was a fake IT worker from North Korea,” Sjouwerman wrote.
KnowBe4 said it can’t provide much detail because of the active FBI investigation. But the person hired for the job may have logged into the company computer remotely from North Korea, Sjouwerman explained:
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.