Amazon blocked more than 1,800 individuals linked to North Korea from applying for jobs, citing efforts by Pyongyang to place IT workers in overseas firms to generate and launder funds.
In a LinkedIn post, Amazon’s Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt said North Korean operatives were attempting to secure remote IT roles with companies worldwide, particularly in the United States. He noted that applications from suspected North Korean workers had risen by nearly one-third over the past year.
According to Schmidt, many of the applicants used so-called «laptop farms», in which computers physically located in the US are operated remotely from abroad. He warned that the issue extends beyond Amazon and is likely affecting the wider tech industry.
US authorities have previously uncovered similar schemes. In July, an Arizona woman was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for running a laptop farm that helped North Korean IT workers gain employment at hundreds of US companies, generating more than $17 million in revenue.
US officials say North Korea uses cyber operations to fund its weapons programmes, with the US Department of the Treasury accusing Pyongyang-linked hackers of stealing billions of dollars in recent years, largely through cryptocurrency theft.
Kursiv Uzbekistan also reports that major cryptocurrencies traded lower over the past 24 hours, led by declines in Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP, as traders reduced exposure to large-cap digital assets amid cautious market sentiment.
