A barely perceptible keystroke delay was the smoking gun that led to the uncovering of a malign imposter.

A North Korean imposter was uncovered, working as a sysadmin at Amazon U.S., after their keystroke input lag raised suspicions with security specialists at the online retail giant. Normally, a U.S.-based remote worker’s computer would send keystroke data within tens of milliseconds. This suspicious individual’s keyboard lag was “more than 110 milliseconds,” reports Bloomberg.

Amazon is commendably proactive in its pursuit of impostors, according to the source report. The news site talked with Amazon’s Chief Security Officer, Stephen Schmidt, about this fascinating new case of North Koreans trying to infiltrate U.S. organizations to raise hard currency for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and sometimes indulge in espionage and/or sabotage.

    • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      20 days ago

      The Norks have quite literally done data breaches and major hacks via this exact method in the past. They basically have nothing to lose on the international level so they do this and then trade it to countries like China or Russia for whatever it is they want. If they didn’t have a documented history of doing shit like that nobody would assume espionage.

      If they didn’t have a known tendency towards weird espionage shit going back to the 50 and 60s nobody would care, but they do have a known tendency towards doing weird espionage shit.