The FBI raided 40 Texas homes over a North Korean scheme that used fake IT workers to target 70 US companies and generate $3 million.

The Justice Department (DoJ) announced coordinated enforcement actions this week targeting North Korea’s long-running scheme to place fake IT workers inside American companies. Two US nationals were arrested, 14 people charged across two separate indictments, and the FBI searched more than 40 residences in Texas, seizing approximately 187 laptops and KVM switch devices.

The Texas operation, called Operation Lonestar Roundup, ran between September 21 and 25. The seized devices are the same laptops American companies shipped to their newly hired remote employees, not knowing those IT workers were North Korean intelligence agents using stolen US identities.

“Today the Department of Justice announced coordinated actions against the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) government’s schemes to fund its regime through remote information technology (IT) work for U.S. companies.” states DoJ. “These actions include an indictment, two arrests, searches of multiple known or suspected “laptop farms” in Texas pursuant to “Operation Lonestar Roundup,” and the seizure of approximately 187 computer devices used by DPRK IT workers.”

The scheme was simple. North Korean IT workers applied for remote jobs using stolen or fake identities. They used VPNs and proxy servers to make it look like they were working from the United States. American helpers received the laptops provided by employers and installed remote access software so the North Korean workers could use them. These helpers were paid for their role, while the money earned from the jobs was sent back to North Korea through accounts controlled by the regime.

According to an indictment from the Northern District of Ohio, the scheme ran from 2019 to mid-2025 and targeted more than 70 US companies across 17 states. The companies operated in sectors including healthcare, communications, cybersecurity support, retail, and manufacturing.

“In total, the scheme impacted more than 70 U.S. company employers and generated approximately $3 million in revenue for IT workers.” SoJ states.”The revenue is believed to have been sent to sanctioned entities controlled by the DPRK. Victim employers included companies in the health care, communications, cyber support, retail, and manufacturing sectors across Ohio, sixteen additional states, and the District of Columbia.”

The North Korean IT workers earned about $3 million, which prosecutors believe was sent to North Korean entities subject to international sanctions.

The authorities warn the scheme is evolving in response to better detection.

“Increasingly, North Korean IT workers are turning to recruiting American facilitators to counter improved private sector detections and law enforcement actions.” states DoJ. “These workers are hiring facilitators to complete a wider variety of tasks, and in some cases subcontracting entire jobs to third-party foreign nationals. “

That’s not just using Americans as props. It’s actively outsourcing parts of the operation to people inside the US, which makes attribution harder and interception more complicated.

Some IT workers are now subcontracting entire jobs to third-party foreign nationals. Others are hiring facilitators to handle a wider range of tasks beyond just managing the laptops. CrowdStrike, which helped the FBI investigate, tracks the group behind this operation as Famous Chollima and describes the laptop farm infrastructure as vital to overcoming the physical and legal barriers of operating from outside the US.

“These laptop farms enabled FAMOUS CHOLLIMA operatives to pose as legitimate remote workers and siphon illicit wages back to their regime while maintaining persistent access to victim organizations. Working alongside the FBI, CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence into the adversary and their operations, and technical analysis helped make these disruptions possible.” states CrowdStrike.

“This operation marks the beginning of a broader U.S. law enforcement effort to dismantle FAMOUS CHOLLIMA’s U.S. infrastructure. CrowdStrike’s Counter Adversary Operations team intends to remain an integral part of that effort.”

The FBI’s separate public service announcement puts the operation in broader context: “thousands of North Korean state-controlled IT workers” are currently embedded at Western companies, posing what the agency calls a significant national security and intellectual property theft insider threat. North Korean IT workers have individually earned up to $300,000 per year under these schemes, and the collective revenue is measured in hundreds of millions annually, flowing directly to designated entities including the North Korean Ministry of Defense.

This is the fifth round of enforcement actions announced since June 2025 under the DOJ’s DPRK RevGen Domestic Enabler Initiative (June 2025, November 2025, April 2026, and May 2026). The initiative targets people in the United States who help North Korean IT workers carry out these schemes.

According to CrowdStrike, North Korean hackers were responsible for about half of all documented hands-on cyber intrusions over the past year. The regime is also targeting cryptocurrency exchanges and open-source software projects. In 2025 alone, North Korean attackers stole at least $2 billion in cryptocurrency.

The DOJ released a list of email addresses used in these operations, including accounts like randyryang@gmail.com and dev.jerryyang@gmail.com, which companies can add to their screening indicators. The FBI’s public service announcement includes detailed mitigation guidance on spotting DPRK IT worker applications. The red flags are consistent: inconsistencies in work history, reluctance to appear on video, requests to redirect laptop deliveries, and payment accounts that route through intermediaries.

“Threats posed by nation-states like North Korea are a stark reminder that our adversaries will go to great measures to exploit our nation’s economic strength to further and fuel their own nefarious agendas,” said U.S. Attorney David M. Toepfer for the Northern District of Ohio. “We are thankful to FBI Cleveland for their incredible work and persistence to put a stop to these bad actors. These charges serve as an urgent alert to all U.S. companies to remain vigilant in their hiring practices.”

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, IT workers)

Ryuk member Karen Vardanyan was sentenced to 24 months in U.S. prison after extradition from Ukraine and ordered to pay $1.2M in restitution.

Karen Vardanyan, a 35-year-old Armenian citizen who went by “Maneeken” and, oddly, “Karl Lagerfeld” online, was extradited from Ukraine and sentenced to 24 months in federal prison plus three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $1,219,106 in restitution to his victims.

“Karen Vardanyan, 35, was sentenced to 24 months in federal prison and 3 years’ supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $1,219,106.00 in restitution to the victims in the case.” states the press release by DoJ..

That number alone tells you the scale of what he was involved in, and it’s only a fraction of the total damage the wider conspiracy caused.

In July, Vardanyan pleaded guilty in the U.S. for his role in Ryuk ransomware attacks targeting American organizations between 2019 and 2020. Extradited from Ukraine after his 2025 arrest, he admitted providing initial access to corporate networks that enabled ransomware deployment.

Between November 2019 and April 2020, Karen Vardanyan illegally accessed corporate networks and helped deploy Ryuk ransomware on hundreds of servers and workstations.

The attacks encrypted victims’ data and demanded Bitcoin payments in exchange for decryption keys. Among the victims were a Michigan company that paid 200 Bitcoin (worth over $1.1 million at the time), a company in Oregon, and a school in Texas. Overall, the group is believed to have collected around 1,610 Bitcoin, valued at more than $15 million when the ransoms were paid.

According to a report published by Advanced-intel and HYAS in 2021, Ryuk was a highly profitable ransomware operation, generating an estimated $150 million in Bitcoin ransom payments. Researchers traced 61 wallet addresses linked to the group and identified laundering mechanisms involving brokers, intermediary wallets, and cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance and Huobi. Ryuk RaaS was run by the crew known as Wizard Spider, which became one of the defining threats of the early pandemic years, hitting hospitals hard while healthcare systems were already stretched to breaking. At its peak, it was compromising roughly 20 organizations a week and pulled in more than $150 million in ransom payments before shutting down in 2020.

The operators used professional money-flow techniques and created unique ProtonMail addresses for each victim to improve operational security and avoid detection.

Hundreds of servers and workstations from a role that was, technically, just the entry point. That’s the part worth sitting with if you’re in charge of defending a network: the person who gets you in the door is rarely the one who does the flashy encryption work, but without them none of it happens.

The FBI investigated the case, and the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs handled the extradition process, with Ukrainian authorities getting a direct thank you for their cooperation, a detail that matters more than it might seem given how often ransomware operators hide behind borders that don’t cooperate with US law enforcement.

Ryuk did not really disappear when the ransomware operation shut down. Wizard Spider later rebranded as Conti, which grew even bigger before its chats and source code leaked in 2022. The group then broke into smaller crews, some joining other ransomware operations and others creating new ones. The Ryuk-to-Conti connection is therefore still visible in today’s ransomware ecosystem.

Whether a 24-month sentence matches more than $1 million in restitution and a role in a $15 million conspiracy is open to debate. But the extradition itself sends a clear message: hiding behind national borders is no longer a guarantee of safety for cybercriminals.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Ryuk)