North Korean Job Fraud Expands Beyond IT Into Healthcare and Sales
North Korea's IT worker scheme (Famous Chollima/PurpleDelta) has expanded from IT into healthcare, sales, and financial services roles worldwide.
Huntress and Recorded Future documented DPRK-linked fraudulent workers landing remote jobs beyond IT, including at an Australian healthcare company, a financial services firm, and a sales hire with a stolen identity. The scheme, tracked as Famous Chollima, Jasper Sleet, Nickel Tapestry, PurpleDelta, UNC5267, and Wagemole, uses forged identity documents, VPNs, proxies, and laptop farms with PiKVM and capture cards to fund Pyongyang's weapons programs. Recorded Future found the PurpleDelta cluster applied to 1,100+ companies between late 2024 and early 2025 with 22 fabricated personas, some AI-generated, using ChatGPT and AI transcription during interviews. Analysts assess the activity is ongoing and likely to expand in scale and sophistication.
Week in review: Compromised Zimbra servers, previously patched Citrix NetScaler flaw exploited
Help Net Security's weekly digest highlights 274 compromised Zimbra servers, Gitea and Citrix NetScaler KEV additions, a PaperCut zero-day, and a suspected Iran-linked power plant attack.
The roundup reports at least 274 internet-facing Zimbra instances compromised via CVE-2026-73570, critical Gitea CVE-2026-60004 added to CISA's KEV catalog after exploitation began, and previously patched Citrix NetScaler flaw CVE-2026-8452 exploited in the wild. It also covers PaperCut NG/MF zero-day attacks, a suspected Iran-linked shutdown of a UK power plant, an FBI seizure of domains tied to a China-linked group that hit NASA, DOJ and the Senate, a cyberattack disrupting Boston Scientific, and the Manchester Airports Group breach. Additional items include Chameleon SEO poisoning phishing, Android car head unit proxy botnet malware, ReliaQuest social engineering by ShinyHunters, fake OpenAI Codex macOS malware, and AI-related workforce and supply chain interviews.
Simulation: the new Scaling Law — Joon Sung Park, Simile AI
Simile AI raised a $2B Series B from GreenOaks and Index Ventures to scale human-behavior simulation for Fortune 100 clients like CVS.
Simile AI, co-founded by Generative Agents researcher Joon Sung Park, announced a $2 billion Series B backed by GreenOaks and Index Ventures, with Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy among backers. The company runs tens of millions of simulations for Fortune 100 clients including CVS, reporting 85-99% accuracy versus human focus groups and digital twins of 1,000 real people at 85% behavioral accuracy. The long-term ambition is foundation models of human behavior, post-trained on interviews, transaction data, and randomized controlled trials, potentially simulating all 8 billion people.
Srsly Risky Biz: Data Theft Extortion Is Booming! Hooray!
Google's Threat Intelligence Group reports data theft extortion is surging, with Silent Ransom extracting $10M and $18M from two law firms and BlackFile taking $10M.
Risky Business News, citing Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), reports that cybercriminals are shifting from encrypting ransomware to data theft extortion. Law firms Goodwin Procter and WilmerHale paid Silent Ransom (Luna Moth) ransoms of $10 million and $18 million respectively; GTIG says the group often completes contact-to-extortion in a single day, now sometimes compromising systems in person posing as IT staff. BlackFile, now calling itself Redact, used high-volume vishing to steal credentials and pivot through OneDrive, SharePoint and other SaaS apps, collecting more than $10 million between February and mid-May with an average ransom of $750,000, including attempted attacks on Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms. The piece argues governments should keep pressure on encrypting ransomware gangs while lower-impact extortion absorbs criminal energy.