WageMole

THREAT ACTOR PROFILE

WageMole

WageMole is a North Korean operation that mixes fraudulent remote employment with malware-laced fake job interviews, overlapping with the activity tracked as Contagious Interview and Famous Chollima. It plants operatives in remote tech, healthcare and sales roles to funnel wages to the regime, and it infects developers who take its trojanized "coding tests."

North Korea

Technology / Finance

First seen

2023

Latest IOC

IP indicators

Hosts

SHA256 hashes

Posts

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Names and aliases

Group profile

Attack lifecycle

Malware and tooling

IOCs

Notable campaigns

NAMES AND ALIASES

WageMole, Contagious Interview and Famous Chollima

WageMole is tracked under many names spanning the IT-worker fraud and the interview-malware sides of the operation. They map to one entry among the DPRK clusters we profile, part of the broader Lazarus Group ecosystem.

GROUP PROFILE

Fraudulent employment and interview malware

WageMole serves North Korea's revenue needs in two linked ways: placing operatives in remote jobs using stolen or forged identities, and infecting job-seeking developers with malware during fake interviews and coding tests. Both funnel money and access back to the regime.

Our record places its origin as North Korea and ties it to crypto, technology and financial targets. The IT-worker fraud has expanded beyond IT into healthcare and sales, using VPNs, proxies and remote KVM tools to hide origin, often operated from laptop farms.

The interview side (Contagious Interview) delivers a well-worn chain: BeaverTail, InvisibleFerret and OtterCookie malware hidden in trojanized apps and npm or PyPI packages that developers run during fake assessments.

Facts:

Initial Access

Russian Federation · GRU

Initial Access

Russian Federation · GRU

Initial Access

Russian Federation · GRU

Initial Access

Russian Federation · GRU

Victims reported in our records and posts:

ATTACK LIFECYCLE

Fake interviews and fraudulent hires

The stages below come from WageMole activity in posts we track on our IOC Hunter feed.

Initial Access

Spear-phishing remains the front door. In the 2026 campaign Hunt.io tracked as Operation Neusploit, APT28 sent convincing spear-phishing from already-compromised government accounts and abused a Microsoft Office security bypass (CVE-2026-21509) to kick off a fileless chain. A separate June 2026 cluster delivered the LameHug malware through spear-phishing ZIP archives using double-extension lures.

Initial Access

MALWARE AND TOOLING

BeaverTail, InvisibleFerret and OtterCookie

Initial Access

CVES EXPLOITED

WageMole

IOCS FROM HUNT.IO PLATFORM

Latest IOCs

We currently track - IP indicators, - hosts, and - SHA256 hashes for Akira across - intelligence posts, with the most recent indicator dated -. The sample below is limited to indicators from the latest posts. It is not the full set.

Showing a sample of recent indicators

Get the complete

WageMole

IOC set, full IP, host and hash history.

Unlock all the IOCs for Free

Showing a sample of recent indicators

Get the complete

WageMole

IOC set, full IP, host and hash history.

Unlock all the IOCs for Free

NOTABLE CAMPAIGNS

IT-worker fraud and trojanized installers

Recent reporting tracks both sides of the operation.

PixyNetLoader tracking

A clustering of roughly 90 loader samples across four sub-families from 2024 to 2026, with steganography and cloud C2, also linking to related APT28 tooling such as SlimAgent and Graphite.

PixyNetLoader tracking

A clustering of roughly 90 loader samples across four sub-families from 2024 to 2026, with steganography and cloud C2, also linking to related APT28 tooling such as SlimAgent and Graphite.

PixyNetLoader tracking

A clustering of roughly 90 loader samples across four sub-families from 2024 to 2026, with steganography and cloud C2, also linking to related APT28 tooling such as SlimAgent and Graphite.

PixyNetLoader tracking

A clustering of roughly 90 loader samples across four sub-families from 2024 to 2026, with steganography and cloud C2, also linking to related APT28 tooling such as SlimAgent and Graphite.