U.S. companies have been hiring remote I.T. workers based in Russia and China. Some of these people are North Korean immigrants, who send most of their paycheck to the Dear Leader for his ballistic missile program. How many North Korean I.T. workers are working for U.S. companies? Thousands. Many even paid Americans to use their home Wi-Fi connection so it would look like they are located in the U.S. Can't these companies at least drag a person in for an interview before they hire them? Thousands of remote IT workers sent wages to North Korea to help fund weapons program, FBI says
Another article on how the FBI got wise to the operation. U.S. Firms Hired North Korean IT Workers Posing as Americans
How broke does your country have to be before you wind up with the idea of funding your major military projects directly by having people go out and get jobs to earn a paycheck that you can spend on missiles? And how many remote tech support annual salaries does it take to buy a ballistic missile?
And how many remote tech support annual salaries does it take to buy a ballistic missile? 42. The secret to the universe is 42.
Tip of the iceberg. NK gets the vast majority of their funds through cyberwarfare which are now considered some of the best in the world.
If only commies (like criminals) would apply their craftiness and determination to honest work, they could probably be productive. Alas, symptomatic of the mental illness that ails them...they only know parasitic taking.
communism in practice was never more than a bunch of capitalists subjugating the freedom of people on a national scale for cheap labor and to steal national resources.
That's what happens to the people that live under the communist control. They don't care about quality of life... they work for better servitude to their masters in government.
This is confusing to me. NK does not let most people use computers at all. Given that how do they find enough people with the talent to be world class hackers?
Likely selected as gifted students taken at an early age and trained their entire childhood on computer usage and programming at a special state "institution". Think of it like a North Korean Jedi Temple for computer programmers.
I think back to an episode of Vice on HBO - here is a snippet from a “computer lab” - skip forward to about 1:00
NK isn't some backwoods country that has no access to the internet. Just the right people have access and their cyberwarfare division has all the tools the NSA has. They use crypto better than anyone on the planet and that's how they are able to skirt around the sanctions. The sanctions are useless against NK. Yeah they are poor but not the Capital City. Think NK like Panam in the Hunger Games. There's all these poor districts with one rich city that is the center. There are external state-sponsored actors that bring in money via crypto like ransomware, crypto hacking, etc. In fact, crypto pays for half of their nuclear program. They also use cyberwarfare for espionage, really about 70% of their activity overall is in cyber-espionage. Where do you think they figured out how to make a nuke? How do you figure they are working on their first 5th gen fighter plane? Stolen from governments like the US. And Russia has been assisting them too. So Kim sent Russia enough armaments to keep Russia in the game for all of 2024. When Russia sold all their old stuff and some of their new stuff to NK, they made them a supplier too because everything matches Russia's arsenal, including ammo. In exchange for this, Russia gives NK intangibles like cyber training. Now NK doesn't need Russia's help in cyberwarfare, they are writing their own book.
