Can you talk us through the tells from application to interview to onboarding to actually employment? Because I imagine they're slightly different things that you might pick up at each of those stages.

Yeah, I call them red flags, but yeah, there's different tells along the way.

Some of them are pretty straightforward for a person who's interviewing to pick up, and others require a little bit of technical know-how.

For example, on their resumes, they're often using a voice over IP phone number.

And so you can do a reverse look up on those phone numbers and see that they're voice over IP.

Now, plenty of people have voice over IP phone numbers.

But that's just one thing.

So Ryan, if a business leader listening to this podcast had never thought about insider threat management as a sort of a structured program, where would you advise them to start?

And what they're finding sounds a lot like deja vu.

So we help one of our clients vet all their employees, and in this case, they had a, another one of these recent hire.

Something seemed off about it.

Their spidey sense was tingling.

They didn't know what was going on, and we were doing the diligence anyway.

When we looked into the person, they had a long history in the US, but they'd actually come from Iran.

There's a lot of people in the US working who have come from Iran and bringing great talents to the country.

They'd infiltrated a startup that, while based in the US, was actually run by people from Israel, Iran's key adversary.

We enjoy curse words here on To Catch a Thief.

One of the heads of security called me and said, this is the worst fucking sales call I've ever received.

You better not be extorting me.

I'm really here to help.

Here's what we did.

Here's what we saw.

Here's what the person is.

Or anyone's, for that matter.

Nisos won't name the client because of confidentiality agreements, but suffice to say, it's one of America's most influential media brands.

They had a weird sense that something was not right with a person who had just left the company.

They were a remote worker.

They're seldom on camera.

When they are, they're pretty occluded.

They're back lit.

You can't see them.

Exactly.

So I'd love to hear your story sort of start to finish in terms of how you came across this situation and, and how you resolved it.

I think that, yeah, I, you know, uh, So I think you're talking about a North Korean worker that we ran an operation on last year.

And it's been quite a whirlwind, actually.

I think it's been one of the most interesting operations I've ever been a part of in my career.

And it was like following along in a detective movie or something as we were doing this.

Yeah, so I'll just give you a little bit of background.

NISOS has been involved in helping our clients... uncover North Korean remote IT worker fraud in their companies since 2023.

To somebody who's not, sort of has your background, what are some things that they could also maybe identify easily in terms of setting off some alarms here?