Recently I submitted an article that
made it to the front page, and only afterwards did I put two and two together to realize why this news is a really big deal to focus my fellow slashdotters' attention on. It was like a Woosh that went over everyone including me at the time. I've even reconsidered re-doing the front-page weekend submission with a new version, but this reply seem as good a place as any to do the deed:
Here's the scam, now that I understand better: North Korean agents set up shop in either Russia or China. From there they fraudulently pose as Western IT contractors working remotely from home developing Wordpress websites or whatever. As far as I can tell, they use sites like upwork.com to get work, which the US FBI says, (without specificity to upwork.com) is allowing North Korea to buy weapons with hard currency. This is a nation state effort with nation state efficiencies to deal with things like US e-Verify apparently, according to the FBI
To get the work in the first place,
they are stealing identities of people like us here on the slashdots. They fraudulently claim the IDs of people with extensive GitHub account histories, because that yields credibility with potential employers because GIT commit histories cannot be faked, along with LinkedIn resumes. Months before I submitted TFA to the front page, I heard
this podcast episode that explains how the hackers achieve success, (you can choose to listen or click to read the full transcript). I didn't make the explanatory connection until after I posted the FBI warning to the front page.