Business

How Amazon’s CSO defends against efforts by North Korean IT workers to infiltrate his company

Published

2 days ago

December 17, 2025

Steve Schmidt, the chief security officer at Amazon, says his team has identified and blocked more than 1,800 attempts by North Korea to secure IT roles at the tech giant. He warns that this scheme is becoming more prevalent across the technology industry as the nation-state actor targets the lucrative salaries of generative artificial intelligence and machine learning jobs, and the troves of valuable data such workers have access to.

“A lot of people don’t think about organized efforts by other parties to get people hired into organizations who have interesting data,” says Schmidt, speaking at an event held by Amazon this week. “It’s actually pretty prolific.”

Schmidt says that in 2025, Amazon has seen a 27% increase in the number of North Korean applications on a quarter-over-quarter basis.

Notable cases throughout the year that point to the growing issue include four North Korean nationals being charged for allegedly scheming to get hired as remote IT workers and then steal nearly $1 million in cryptocurrency; a campaign to create a fake job-application platform to get hired at major AI companies; and a woman in Arizona who was sentenced to eight years in prison for her role in a $17 million scam to help North Koreans steal U.S. identities to secure remote IT roles.

These identity theft schemes represent an ever-escalating confrontation between nation-state actors like North Korea and major Fortune 500 companies, as bad actors develop new deception techniques and businesses respond by bolstering their defenses. The cycle continues and escalates because, for countries like North Korea, these schemes can generate big financial windfalls and access to proprietary data.

AI is increasingly being used as a tool to monitor and identify these criminals, but also by the criminals themselves for attacks. Last month, Anthropic generated headlines when it disclosed that purported Chinese operators used that AI startup’s coding tool to target about 30 organizations.

Schmidt says the North Korean approach has changed over time, evolving from creating entirely fabricated profiles online to purchasing identities from Americans with legitimate backgrounds. The hackers will then aim to use these credentials to infiltrate an employer.

He says that Amazon has bolstered defenses through a mix of AI-enabled tools and human prevention efforts, a process he says the company has refined over the past two years. AI models have been trained to look for suspicious activity, including how North Korean operatives may list their contact information. They tend to use a plus symbol at the front of a phone number, which most Americans don’t do, and Amazon has identified around 200 different academic institutions that these IT workers use in their résumés.

These fake IT workers will also list nonexistent companies in their employment history. Some of these fake companies may actually have a registered business presence in a given state with a human who works for them to “verify” past employment, but they have no real operations.

Amazon now conducts more interviews in person and Schmidt says that the company’s mandate to bring workers fully back in the office also has some security benefits. “It is very, very hard to hide behind somebody else’s identity when you have to be in the office,” Schmidt tells Fortune.

Identity verification is now required at multiple stages throughout the interview process. And once someone is hired, Amazon keeps an eye on suspicious patterns of computer usage and the quality of work that’s being produced. Schmidt says the bad actors produce software code that is “markedly lower” in quality when working in the office versus when they are remote.

He calls for IT and human resources departments to more closely coordinate on hiring. At Amazon, the security team has access to the résumés, LinkedIn feeds, and other data that recruiters use to lure talent, and AI models are used to flag accounts that look suspicious. “It’s actually a lot cheaper for the HR organization if we discover the problem up front,” says Schmidt.

Amazon’s internally developed authentication system is called Midway; it both verifies an employee’s identity and controls access to their systems. The company relies on what’s known as “Universal 2nd Factor,” which uses physical security keys, rather than one-time passwords. Authentication requires a device that Amazon trusts, with the physical token and a pin that’s associated with that token.

Schmidt says Amazon’s security team is leveraging AI in quite a few ways, including speeding up security analysis (reviews that traditionally took hours and can now be completed in about 10 minutes); detecting and removing fake AI-written reviews on the company’s retail page; and identifying potential flaws in AI-written software code. The latter effort is called “autonomous threat analysis,” in which two sets of AI agents compete with each other to look for problems in the code and mitigate them before a product is launched.

As Amazon has embraced agentic AI capabilities, Schmidt says the company made an investment in Midway to build software that would allow it to securely identify the agent itself, as well as the action it has been authorized to take on behalf of a person. AI agents are like humans in that they need boundaries: An AI agent in robotics shouldn’t have access to the retail division, while a customer service agent shouldn’t touch Amazon Web Services.

“That agent that’s in the middle is not a service, which is the underlying layers of software talking to each other, and it’s not a human, it’s both together” says Schmidt. “We had to make that investment to ensure that we put the right boundaries around the agent.”

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

OpenAI debuts new model amid heightened competition. ChatGPT owner OpenAI recently debuted a new AI model called GPT-5.2, which Fortune reports beats other existing models by substantial margins in many categories and performed particularly well on a benchmark of complicated professional tasks including law, accounting, and finance. OpenAI reported that customers including legal AI startup Harvey and communications technology provider Zoom found that GPT-5.2 demonstrated a “state of the art” ability to use other software tools to complete tasks and also excelled at writing and debugging code. Separately this week, OpenAI also released a new flagship image-generation model that’s more precise at editing and can generate images at a faster speed.

Disney signs a $1 billion licensing deal with OpenAI. Entertainment giant Disney announced it would make an equity investment in OpenAI and allow the AI giant’s Sora video model to use Disney characters and images from its franchises. CEO Bob Iger said that the Disney viewed technology advancements, including AI, as “opportunity, not threat. It’s going to happen regardless, and we’d rather participate in the rather dramatic growth, rather than just watching it happen and essentially being disrupted by it.” Disney will also receive warrants to buy additional equity in OpenAI; the entertainment company will leverage the company’s technology to build new products and tools, including for its streaming service Disney+, and deploy ChatGPT for its employees.

CoreWeave and other AI stocks are taking a hit. The Wall Street Journal reports on a big stock tumble for data-center operator CoreWeave, with shares losing $33 billion in value in just six weeks. The report attributes the selloff to worries about an AI bubble, pressure from a short seller, and the company’s recent failed merger with crypto miner Core Scientific. Shares of Broadcom and Oracle have also faced pressure this week; market jitters are intensifying as these companies spend massively on AI in hopes that a big return on investment can be unlocked later. Fortune reports that the selloff may ultimately be healthy: The market is selling off select stocks of companies that have been spending too much, but investors remain broadly bullish on the overall market, with the S&P 500 index still up 16% for the year.

Airbnb CIO departs weeks after CTO’s exit. The online home-rental marketplace confirmed that CIO Lucius DiPhillips would leave Airbnb after nearly eight years to pursue a new career opportunity. DiPhillips, who had served as CIO since 2020, has also previously held technology leadership roles at eBay, PayPal, and Bank of America. The move comes after Airbnb announced in November that the company’s CTO, Ari Balogh, was departing. Airbnb is expected to roll out more AI updates within the company’s app in 2026, Bloomberg reports.

AI regulation picture heats up as 2025 winds down. The end of 2025 is proving to be a hot moment for news of AI regulation, with the top news story involving President Trump’s executive order, signed on Thursday, that aimed to set a federal regulatory framework to protect the nation’s “global A.I. dominance” and potentially nix some state safety and consumer protection laws. Separately, attorneys general from dozens of U.S. states and territories sent a letter last week to top AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft that warned them to fix “delusional outputs,” linking some troublesome AI usage to mental illness-related harm and dangerous interactions with children. In Europe, Google is facing a probe for potentially breaching European Commission rules by using online content for AI purposes.

ADOPTION CURVE

CIOs are sitting closer to the CEO, a role they increasingly covet for themselves. CIOs have captured more attention from the C-suite and boards as enterprises across all sectors embrace more generative AI tools to transform work and business strategy. That means these technologists are also getting more direct exposure to their CEOs. Today, 65% of CIOs report directly to the CEO, a big leap from 41% a decade ago, according to a recent survey conducted by Deloitte.

The consulting firm says that more direct access to the executive leadership team and an expanded mandate on fast-developing technologies is also fueling loftier career ambitions. The survey found that 67% of CIOs say that they would like to pursue a CEO job in the future. That’s higher than the rates among chief information and security officers (55%), chief data and analytics officers (42%), and chief technology officers (41%).

One notable CIO who made this exact leap is Jim Siders, who spent more than 12 years at software giant Palantir and recently departed to become CEO of Shield Technologies Partners, a new venture focused on IT services that’s a subsidiary of Thrive Holdings, which was launched in April by OpenAI and Thrive Capital.

Courtesy of Deloitte

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

– Transdev North America is seeking a CIO, based in Lombard, Illinois. Posted salary range: $290K-$325K/year.

– Flournoy Health Systems is seeking a CTO, based in Atlanta. Posted salary range: $220K-$240K/year.

– Angle Health is seeking a head of IT and cybersecurity, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $200K-$300K/year.

– AHI Travel is seeking a VP of IT, based in the greater Chicago area. Posted salary range: $130K-$150K/year.

Hired:

– Leidos appointed Theodore “Ted” Tanner Jr. as CTO, who will take on the role on Jan. 5 to succeed Jim Carlini. Carlini had served in the role since 2019 and previously announced plans to step down. Tanner joins the IT services provider from AI modules maker BigBear.ai, where he served as chief technology and strategy officer. Tanner also previously worked for Apple and Microsoft.

– Tenable announced the appointment of Vlad Korsunsky as CTO, reporting to co-CEO Steve Vintz and based in the cybersecurity company’s Tenable Israel Innovation Center in Tel Aviv. Korsunsky joins Tenable after more than a decade at Microsoft, where he served as the corporate vice president of cloud and enterprise security.

– eXp Realty named Carrie Lysenko to serve as CTO of the cloud-based real estate brokerage, which is a subsidiary of eXp World Holdings. Lysenko joins the company after most recently serving as CEO of Canadian real estate brokerage Zoocasa. She also spent more than 14 years at The Weather Network.

– Papa announced the appointment of Thomas Carlough as CTO, overseeing all product, data, and engineering for the online platform that connects caregiver services to older adults. Most recently, Carlough served as CTO of health organization Wider Circle.

– Intel 471 promoted Steve Micallef to the CTO role and the cybersecurity company’s executive team. Micallef has worked for the company since 2022 and has more than 25 years of experience in cybersecurity and threat intelligence, including at UBS, Google, and the company he founded, SpiderFood, which was later acquired by Intel 471.

– MedSpeed appointed Dhiraj Patkar as chief product and technology officer. Patkar joins the health care same-day logistics provider after previously serving as senior vice president at consulting firm AVIA Health. Patkar also cofounded two health care companies, Medtelligent and Wishbone Club.

– PlanHub promoted Mourad Zerroug to the role of CTO, leading technology, engineering, data, AI, and product development. Zerroug initially joined the commercial construction-focused software provider in January as VP of engineering. Previously, Zerroug served as CTO at event marketing technology company Splash and as a VP at real estate software developer Lone Wolf Technologies.

FORTUNE AIQ: THE YEAR IN AI—AND WHAT’S AHEAD

Businesses took big steps forward on the AI journey in 2025, from hiring Chief AI Officers to experimenting with AI agents. The lessons learned—both good and bad–combined with the technology’s latest innovations will make 2026 another decisive year. Explore all of Fortune AIQ, and read the latest playbook below:

–2025 was the year of agentic AI. How did we do?

–AI coding tools exploded in 2025. The first security exploits show what could go wrong.

–The big AI New Year’s resolution for businesses in 2026: ROI.

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Business

Epstein files: Trump, Clinton, Summers, Gates not returning any results in search bar

Published

29 minutes ago

December 19, 2025

Jace Porter

The Justice Department released a massive trove of files related to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, but the site housing the information was failing to turn up any results.

The data dump came on the deadline that Congress established last month for disclosing the highly anticipated information, though a top Justice official suggested that not all the documents would come out at once with more due in the coming weeks.

While President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and scores of other powerful men have been linked to Epstein, their names failed to come up in a search of DOJ’s “Epstein Library.”

“No results found. Please try a different search,” the site says after queries for their names.

The site adds that “Due to technical limitations and the format of certain materials (e.g., handwritten text), portions of these documents may not be electronically searchable or may produce unreliable search results.”

However, Clinton also appears in photos that were released as does the late pop singer Michael Jackson. Other records were heavily redacted.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the Justice Department had identified 1,200 victims of Epstein or their relatives and redacted materials that could reveal their identities, according to the New York Times.

Last month, an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in Congress produced legislation to force the Trump administration to release the DOJ files, though emails and photos from Epstein’s estate had already come out.

One of the sponsors of that legislation, Rep. Ro Khanna, warned on Friday that if DOJ doesn’t show that it’s complying with the law, Congress could hold impeachment hearings for Attorney General Pam Bondi and Blanche.

Earlier on Friday, Blanche told Fox News that “several hundred thousand” pages would be released on Friday. “And then, over the next couple of weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” he added.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Want a job in AI-era tech? Forget prestigious degrees—tech leaders want to see your GitHub projects and internships

Published

2 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Jace Porter

For decades, computer science has been sold as one of the surest paths to economic security. And leaders across politics and industry—from former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—have at times urged students not to overlook the field, framing coding skills as the secret to stable, high-paying jobs.

But as artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the workplace, that promise is starting to look less certain.

A new survey of more than 200 engineering leaders, conducted by tech training nonprofit CodePath and shared exclusively with Fortune, shows entry-level tech hiring is slowing. More than one-third of respondents, 38%, said their company has reduced the number of entry-level hiring over the past year, and nearly 1 in 7 reported pausing Gen Z hiring altogether.

At the same time, 18% said hiring had stayed the same, and 8% reported an increase. Despite the overall slowdown, CodePath CEO Michael Ellison—a Y Combinator alum—argues telling people to avoid tech right now would be a mistake.

“That’s just kind of like taking crazy pills if you end up choosing not to invest in the tools that make you the most powerful—of telling computers what you want them to do in an age where computers are becoming exponentially more powerful,” Ellison told Fortune. “So to me, it’s like saying, ‘don’t learn how to use the internet.’”

Ellison’s argument reflects a broader shift in how computer science fits into the AI economy. As generative AI tools become more capable, understanding how software works—and how to direct, customize, and integrate AI systems—is increasingly seen as a foundational skill rather than a specialized one.

That demand is already showing up in the labor market. AI literacy topped LinkedIn’s list of the skills professionals are prioritizing and companies are hiring for right now. And a Lightcast analysis of more than 1.3 billion job postings in 2024 found roles advertising at least one AI or generative AI skill offered an average of $18,000 more in annual compensation that those that did not.

Notably, the majority of those roles were outside the tech sector. Some 51% of jobs requiring AI skills were in non-tech industries, up from 44% in 2022—a sign coding and AI fluency are becoming relevant far beyond Silicon Valley.

The new secret to landing a tech job

Still, slowing hiring doesn’t mean aspiring technologists should give up. Instead, the CodePath data suggests candidates may need to rethink what they emphasize—and what they leave off—when applying for tech roles.

When asked which signals matter most outside the interview process, engineering leaders indicated proof of real-world skills matter far more than formal credentials. Side projects or portfolios topped the list, cited by 38% of respondents, followed by internship experience (35%), and public code portfolios like GitHub (34%).

Traditional markers of achievement, by contrast, carried far less weight. Just 4% of leaders said credentialing programs were a top influence in hiring decisions, while only 23% cited a candidate degree or academic focus and 17% pointed to school prestige.

The shift away from pedigree suggests employers are seeking evidence candidates can actually do the work. Greater fluency with AI tools and frameworks was the most common skill expectation for early-career hires, followed by faster time to writing production-ready code and the ability to learn new tools or programming languages quickly.

And despite buzz about tech layoffs, job opportunities do still exist. The U.S. federal government, for example, recently announced it would be hiring about 1,000 new engineers, data scientists, and AI specialists. No degrees or work experience is required—and salaries will range from $150,000 to $200,000. Meta has also still been hiring young talent in recent weeks, with job postings for roles such as product software engineers.

Ellison’s advice for those seeking roles is simple: Opportunities are out there as long as you are willing to dig in deeper—and build a portfolio that hiring managers are looking for.

“People are rewarded for being aggressive and for going after what they want,” he said. It’s surprising the opportunities that are hidden in plain sight.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Published

2 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Jace Porter

You’re not imagining it: The AI job squeeze isn’t some future apocalypse, it’s already quietly underway.

Professor Yoshua Bengio spent four decades building the technology that is now coming for your job. He is a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal, a Turing Award winner, and one of the most-cited scientists in the world on Google Scholar—and now he’s turned his back on his life’s work to warn that your job is probably already under threat.

Desk jobs, or as Bengio called them, “cognitive jobs, the jobs that you can do behind a keyboard,” will be the first casualties of automation.

“It’s just a matter of time,” the AI pioneer stressed on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast.

“Unless we hit a wall scientifically, like some obstacle prevents us from making progress to make AIs smarter and smarter, there’s going to be a time when they’ll be doing more and more, able to do more and more of the work that people do … And then, of course, it takes years for companies to really integrate that into their workflows, but they’re eager to do it. So it’s more a matter of time than, is it happening or not?”

And he admitted that it’s Gen Z new-hires who are currently being hit hardest by AI, as junior roles are the easiest to cut, consolidate, or backfill with software—but eventually everyone’s jobs will be impacted within five years.

It’s not just office jobs that are at risk; even trade jobs and democracy itself are threatened

For years, degrees were pushed as the key to success for the young and aspirational looking to nab well-paying and stable jobs. But now, even highly educated students are finding themselves “unemployable” as employers launch a “wait-and-watch strategy” in the midst of AI. Graduates in the U.K. are facing the worst job market since 2018. And companies like Intel, IBM, and Google have been freezing thousands of would-be new roles that AI is expected to take over in the next five years.

But it’s not just a blip or a reflection of the current economy, Bengio warned. As more firms lean on AI and eventually robots, too, the technology will only get smarter, he said.

“As companies are deploying more and more robots, they will be collecting more and more data. So eventually, it’s going to happen,” Bengio said when asked whether AI will be able to wipe out all work. Even young people trying to outsmart automation by ditching degrees or upskilling into trade jobs are destined for the same dead end.

“So if you do a physical job—as Geoffrey Hinton is often saying, you should be a plumber or something—it’s going to take more time [for AI to replace your job], but I think it’s only a temporary thing.”

Now, knowing the devastation AI could cause, Bengio said he regrets his life’s work.

“I should have seen this coming much earlier, but I didn’t pay much attention to the potentially catastrophic risks,” the 61-year-old admitted. “But my turning point was when ChatGPT came, and also with my grandson, I realized that it wasn’t clear if he would have a life 20 years from now, because we’re starting to see AI systems that are resisting being shut down.”

He’s since founded LawZero, a nonprofit organization focused on building safe and human-aligned AI systems. But at the current rate of change, his warning is clear: It’s not just jobs, even democracy could collapse in as little as two decades.

His message for CEOs? “Step back from your work. Talk to each other, and let’s see if together, we can solve the problem. Because if we are stuck in this competition, we’re going to take huge risks that are not good for you, not good for your children.”

Join us at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit May 19–20, 2026, in Atlanta. The next era of workplace innovation is here—and the old playbook is being rewritten. At this exclusive, high-energy event, the world’s most innovative leaders will convene to explore how AI, humanity, and strategy converge to redefine, again, the future of work. Register now.

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