> Once employed in a full-time role, fake workers are often very successful, since they sometimes have multiple people helping them to produce their work, with the hope of getting a promotion and gaining more privileged access to the IT systems.

I think the "fake" part is the long term play to get enough privilege to presumably perform a cybersecurity attack. But less "fake" and more "spy" from the description - the outlined scheme is literally what spies agencies do.

Perhaps fake is not the correct word, but the actual individuals are likely to have more than a few faked details. They do exist, of course.

It's also very dubious becuase, well, would you really hire a worker from an organization that also does things like hack hospitals and then hold systems hostage for bitcoin?

They could have all the oil in the world and we'd be no more in a position to do anything about it.

*US, Uk, Australia, Netherlands, Canada, France, New Zealand, Phillipines, Tukey, Thailand, South Africa, Greece, Belgum, Luxembourg, Ethopia, Columbia, and South Korea.

Yeah, you will need a solid source for that.

This isn't the 1990s, while malnutrition may happen, and there have been occasional shortages (covid was one example), it's unlikely people are starving to death in 2026, let alone multiple, let alone per day.

On top of that: North Korea is not that isolated as people think. North Koreans have smartphones and plenty of those living near the chinese border have chinese sim cards. Ever wondered why defectors say they regularly phone their family? Because virtually every north korean knows somebody with a chinese phone.

Of course flow of information outside is still tightly controlled and such, but there's zero direct evidence for starvation happening.

Edit: Lol saying anything positive about North Korea on hacker news and people instantly freak out. This fucking website man. North Korea isn't what I would call a free society but it's also not the hell on earth that most liberals want you to think it is. So much of the misery that normal North Koreans have to face is because of western imposed sanctions. We've tried punishing them for 30 years now, it hasn't destroyed the regime if anything they double down. I guess it's easy for a bunch of overfed over paid tech workers to not feel any kind of solidarity for a North Korean though and insist on punishing them even more. Hell the North Korean government would even be open for this kind of agreement if we would actually guarantee their sovereignty, sadly trusting the United States of America to hold up any kind of deal you make with them is fucking impossible.

Here is a quote I came up with but is attributed to Henry Kissinger

Having the United States as your enemy is dangerous, but having them as your friend is fatal.

That old bag liked it so much he had no problem taking credit for it.

I actually turned down a fly-to-texas for an in person interview about a year back, but I do think in the age of the internet if we don't sacrifice some of the things we have taken for granted in the past, we're going to lose our country. Perhaps there should be a law that requires a picture of any employee standing next to their boss for continued employment - at some point in the future. (this is just an idea, not to start a flamewar, don't attack the specific idea, but attack the idea of some kind of extra checking if you don't agree with it)

https://youtu.be/7HWfwLBqSQ4?si=LmKuVBRVQ0y03prP&t=52

It wouldn't matter. They'd hire some actor to do it. If you insist that they take precautions to be sure the person in the video interview looks like the guy they meet, they'll do that too... but the one doing the work will do so remotely from Pyongyang. There might be technology fixes for this, but they almost certainly involve isolating the United States' internet from most of the rest of the world.

The tenuous grasp of spoken English despite a degree taught in English is also not unusual.

Setting aside the fraud for a moment (which is an insurmountable barrier to employeeing them).

To some extent I'd be satisfied if they actually had a degree and were productive. They obviously need good enough receptive and written English to work.

Especially if they are earning 5k per year as the title suggests.