At a glance.
- US Treasury sanctions entities tied to North Korea's fake IT worker operations.
- Biden Administration won't enforce TikTok ban.
- Russia's Star Blizzard targets WhatsApp accounts.
US Treasury sanctions entities tied to North Korea's fake IT worker operations.
The US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) yesterday announced sanctions against two individuals and four entities accused of involvement in North Korea's fraudulent IT worker scheme, SecurityWeek reports. OFAC sanctioned "a network that consists of a DPRK government weapons-trading department, two of its front companies that employ DPRK IT workers in Laos, two DPRK leaders of those front companies, and a Chinese company supplying the DPRK government with electronics equipment."
Treasury stated, "The DPRK dispatches thousands of highly skilled information technology (IT) workers around the world with orders to generate revenue for the DPRK government to circumvent U.S. and United Nations (UN) sanctions. These IT workers obfuscate their identities and locations to fraudulently obtain freelance employment contracts from clients around the world for IT projects, such as software and mobile application development. The DPRK government withholds up to 90 percent of the wages earned by these overseas workers, thereby generating annual revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars for the Kim regime’s weapons programs to include weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile programs.