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Contagious Interview, also tracked as FAMOUS CHOLLIMA and UNC5342, is a Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)-linked threat cluster primarily associated with fraudulent remote IT-worker operations and developer-focused intrusion activity. The cluster uses false or stolen identities, proxy services, remote-access arrangements, and interview deception to obtain legitimate employment at overseas organizations. Workers may perform assigned work while remitting income to the DPRK, creating sanctions-evasion risk and potential insider access for intelligence collection, theft, or follow-on operations. Reported victims and applicants span information technology, healthcare, financial services, sales, and marketing roles. Contagious Interview has also been linked to social-engineering campaigns targeting software developers, including fake coding assignments and malicious software-package supply-chain activity. Its reported operations have used cross-platform remote-access tooling, host and filesystem discovery, persistence, delivery of additional payloads, and cryptocurrency-focused objectives. UNC5342 has used blockchain-based infrastructure to stage malware including Jadesnow and an InvisibleFerret variant associated with cryptocurrency theft. The group is part of the broader DPRK cyber ecosystem, whose operations combine revenue generation, sanctions evasion, espionage support, and theft.
Mallory correlates actor tradecraft and target patterns against your stack, your sector, and your geography. See overlap before they land.
Who, where, and (when attributed) which flag flies behind the operation. Pulled from open-source reporting and Mallory's analyst review.
Sectors the actor has been observed targeting.
Geographies tied to known operations.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
42 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
36 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
31 additional families tracked in Mallory.
2 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 2 of them exploited in the wild.
"A critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, identified as CVE-2025-55182 and dubbed React2Shell, exists within the React Server Components (RSC) architecture, allowing unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code..."
This detection identifies instances where Windows Explorer.exe spawns PowerShell or cmd.exe processes, particularly focusing on executions initiated by LNK files. This behavior is associated with the ZDI-CAN-25373 Windows shortcut zero-day vulnerability, where specially crafted LNK files are used to trigger malicious code execution through cmd.exe or powershell.exe. This technique has been actively exploited by multiple APT groups in targeted attacks through both HTTP and SMB delivery methods.
894 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
20 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Opération soutenue par l’État nord-coréen impliquant l’usurpation d’identité et le recrutement de personnes servant de façades légales. Les proxys passent les contrôles KYC et les entretiens, reçoivent les salaires sur des comptes locaux, puis transfèrent 65 % de la rémunération aux travailleurs nord-coréens. Le dispositif crée un risque d’accès distant aux environnements d’entreprise, de vol de code et de propriété intellectuelle, d’exfiltration, d’extorsion et de sanctions OFAC.
Sous-cluster associé aux opérations de travailleurs IT nord-coréens sous fausses identités, utilisées pour générer des revenus et potentiellement obtenir des accès privilégiés à des fins d’espionnage ou de vol.
Identified in the assessment as a Lazarus subset associated with the North Korea-linked developer-targeting activity.
North Korean threat cluster using AI in operations, including bulk LLM API registration with hijacked accounts.
Match sector + geo + tech-stack targeting against your real footprint.
Every observed MITRE ATT&CK technique, grouped by tactic.
Families this actor is known to deploy, with IOCs and behavior.
CVEs this actor has used in known campaigns.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Domains, IPs, and hashes tied to this actor, refreshed continuously.