According to a recent Wired report, North Korean IT workers have been hired—often unknowingly—by major organizations, including telecom and IT firms. These imposters use stolen or fake identities to land remote jobs, often slipping through standard background checks and hiring platforms, and gain access to sensitive corporate environments under the guise of legitimate employment.
Their goals? Extract source code, access credentials, exfiltrate data, and plant long-term backdoors. In many cases, they remain undetected for months. Unlike other nation-state threats focused on intelligence gathering, these threatsare largely motivated by financial gain with the goal of funneling revenue back to the North Korean regime to fund weapons development and sustain the government under international sanctions.
This threat highlights a dangerous blind spot in remote access policies, particularly for companies that rely solely on VPNs, IP filtering, or credential-based access.
How Appgate ZTNA Mitigates the Risk
Appgate ZTNA delivers identity-centric, context-driven access control that significantly reduces the risk posed by remote threat actors. Here’s how it works:
Real-Time, Risk-Aware Decisions: Appgate ZTNA’s risk engine integrates with platforms like CrowdStrike and SentielOne to ingest real-time threat intelligence and device health data. If malicious activity is detected or suspected, access entitlements can be withdrawn in near-real time. This ability to react dynamically makes it far more difficult for adversaries to maintain a persistent presence.
Strong Device and User Trust: Access is granted only if both the user identity and device meet policy requirements. Appgate ZTNA ensures the device is managed, protected, and compliant with security controls—before allowing any connection. This prevents unauthorized or redirected devices from connecting, even if credentials are compromised.
Identity-Centric Segmentation: Appgate ZTNA enforces one-to-one network connections based on user identity and device trust, allowing access only to explicitly authorized resources. This is not legacy microsegmentation. Instead, Appgate ZTNA dynamically builds individual access pathways between users and the specific resources they need—nothing more. This dramatically reduces the risk of granting excess permissions, or indirect access to sensitive systems. Appgate ZTNA treats identity as a multidimensional profile, factoring in user, device, context, and third-party attributes to drive precise, policy-based access decisions.
A Cloaked Network Surface: Appgate ZTNA’s use of Single Packet Authorization (SPA) makes protected resources invisible to unauthorized users. This reduces attack surface, prevents unauthorized discovery, and blocks opportunistic exploitation. If a session is compromised or misused, cloaking prevents escalation by hiding the rest of the network from view. While not a silver bullet, this acts as a critical compensating control that frustrates lateral movement and helps contain damage. Log data and justification-based access can help uncover and analyze access misuse retroactively.
Why This Matters to Business Leaders
These North Korean IT scams aren’t just a cybersecurity issue—they’re a financially motivated, state-sponsored campaign designed to exploit business blind spots at scale. The risks extend far beyond IT and into core business functions:
Unknowingly Funding a Sanctioned Foreign Regime: Hiring an imposter doesn’t just expose internal systems—it may constitute a violation of international sanctions. Organizations risk unknowingly paying adversarial actors, creating legal and financial liability for the business (i.e. HR teams, CFOs, and boards of directors).
Barriers to Growth, Investment, and M&A: A breach involving source code theft or unauthorized access can disrupt audits, delay M&A deals, or diminish valuation during fundraising or IPO planning. As due diligence increasingly includes Zero Trust maturity, access control becomes a boardroom conversation.
Board-Level Accountability and Executive Risk: Cyber incidents tied to credential misuse or weak access enforcement often result in executive turnover, shareholder scrutiny, and long-term brand damage. Boards are now expected to oversee cyber risk as part of their fiduciary duty, and lapses are no longer tolerated.
Escalating Cost of Containment and Recovery: Even without a confirmed breach, uncovering a North Korean IT worker on your network can trigger emergency incident response, legal reviews, and reputational damage control—draining resources and creating cross-functional disruption that impacts business performance.
Appgate ZTNA minimizes these risks by enforcing adaptive, identity-aware policies at the point of access and revoking those entitlements in real time when behavior shifts.
Final Thoughts
Remote work has expanded the attack surface—and with it, the opportunity for persistent, financially motivated threats like North Korean IT worker scams to slip through traditional defenses. While no solution can guarantee complete prevention, especially when a malicious insider is granted legitimate access, organizations can take meaningful steps to frustrate, contain, and respond to these threats effectively.
Appgate ZTNA is designed to limit what an attacker can see and do—enforcing individualized access pathways, dynamically adjusting entitlements based on real-time context, and cloaking the rest of the network from view. Even if an adversary gains initial access, their ability to move, escalate, or discover sensitive systems is significantly constrained.
The time to adopt a modern, identity-aware approach is now. With Appgate ZTNA, you can reduce your attack surface, cut off unnecessary access, and gain the visibility and control you need to stop threats before they turn into business-altering or catastrophic events.
Protect your organization—start your free Appgate ZTNA trial today and see how identity-centric security can help stop modern threats.