For subscribers
I’m human. Are you? The battle for our online identity
The increasing ubiquity of AI makes it harder to authenticate who someone is in the digital realm.
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The identification and authentication of users is one of the hardest challenges we face on the internet because technology is evolving so fast, but it is critical that we meet it.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: PIXABAY
John Thornhill
It’s every manager’s worst nightmare: hiring a remote employee who turns out to be a North Korean hacker intent on loading malware on to your network. But that’s what happened to the US cyber security company KnowBe4 in 2024, as the company’s founder Stu Sjouwerman described in a candid blog post.
KnowBe4 had posted a job ad for an AI software engineer, interviewed candidates by video, conducted background checks, verified references and made an offer. But soon after the company sent a Mac workstation to the remote employee’s notional address, he went rogue. The company quickly discovered he was a fake North Korean IT worker, who had used a valid, but stolen, US-based identity to land the job. He then accessed the workstation remotely from Asia via an “IT mule laptop farm”.
