Krakken recently revealed an intelligence gathering operation that started as a routine hiring process.

During the operation, the crypto exchange recorded interviews and information as a suspect North Korean operative attempted to get a job in IT at the firm.

Crackin's chief security officer, Nick Perkoko, joins us now. Nick, welcome to CoinDesk.

Yeah, hey, thanks for having me.

All right. Crazy story. Let's start here. What tipped you off that you might be talking to a North Korean spy?

Yeah, so we have a lot of intelligence sources that flow into Cracken constantly, you know, through various industry groups, other forums that were part of. And,

you know, we had received a list of email addresses of known adversaries. Some were known as

potential North Koreans. And whenever we receive either email addresses or IP addresses or other

sort of identifiable information, we scrub our systems

to try to see. Are there any clients that match these email addresses? Are there any potential

employees that match any of these email addresses? Are there candidates that match the email

addresses? And so when we did that, we were lucky enough to have a hit in our applicant

tracking system. Now, this was not someone

that was making its way through the interview process with us. It was a resume that was in a bucket

of other resumes that was just not really being looked at yet by the recruiting team.

Now, when you looked at that resume, was it one that usually you would look at

and invite for an interview? Were there red flags in the application and the resume? Yeah, it depends

on what we were looking for. The person was more of a technology generalist, I would say,

as far as the resume was concerned.

There was no like standout skill set that we would have been interested in.

So they likely would have just been reviewed by the recruiting team, you know, put into a pile of,

you know, maybe someday or maybe even just sent a rejection email.

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