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Stu Sjouwerman: We were hiring a fairly specific, hard-to-find software engineer who had background in AI. We have a number of AI initiatives, and so we needed a software engineer to support all those initiatives.

Jessica Mendoza: The job was posted on online job forums, and pretty soon, resumes started to flow in from all over the country, and one candidate stood out. He said his name was Kyle.

Stu Sjouwerman: "Mr. Kyle" quote, unquote, air quotes, had experience with exactly everything that we needed. It was a very good interview. He was very open. He talked about his strengths and weaknesses, indicated where he felt he needed additional training and indicated a career path. And so, was the perfect interviewee, which made us move to the next step.

Jessica Mendoza: After conducting background checks, Stu's company decided to hire Kyle as a remote employee. They sent him a work laptop to an address in Washington State and started the onboarding process. But almost immediately, it became clear that Kyle was not who he said he was.

Stu Sjouwerman: At that point in time, our team started seeing very concerning traffic on that laptop.

Jessica Mendoza: What kind of concerning traffic?

Stu Sjouwerman: Well, Kyle immediately started downloading malware. We immediately saw that a whole bunch of things were happening that should not be. We tried to get in touch with him and asked if he needed any help. I think this was through Slack, and he said, "Yes, I am trying to debug my router and I'm following instructions from a list." And this is where it became very, very iffy, very fast.

Jessica Mendoza: The company shut down Kyle's laptop and quickly fired him. And then, they investigated. What exactly was Kyle doing? The answer took them completely by surprise.

Stu Sjouwerman: Yes, we have egg on our face because we hired a fake North Korean IT worker, but this is what happened. And if it can happen to us, it can happen to almost anybody.

Jessica Mendoza: It's kind of unbelievable that you hired a North Korean spy as one of your IT guys.

Stu Sjouwerman: Yes. That is pretty scary. And there are hundreds if not thousands that are actually, as we speak right now, in this same situation and delivering work for United States companies.