With the arrival of AI, some businesses have been overwhelmed with applications from suspected North Korean operatives.
Last year, employees at Cinder, a tech startup that provides content moderation software and is led by former intelligence officials, began to notice strange anomalies in the thousands of job applications it received. While many of the resumes were impressive, touting roles at Facebook and Google, the people who submitted them often had no internet presence beyond professional networking sites. Sometimes their profiles appeared to match those of other people. During interviews, a number of them spoke poor English. When a Cinder employee grilling one applicant recognized a Korean accent, the company began to worry it might be the target of a North Korean scheme.
During one virtual interview “with a suspected North Korean applicant, I said that we come from the CIA and work on nation state investigations,” Cinder’s engineering head Declan Cummings told Forbes. “He dropped from the call immediately.” The company recently said in a blog post that it believed as many as 80% of its applicants from some job websites were North Korean.
Cinder is one of thousands of companies that have been inundated by........