TREE NEWS update: Japan’s National Police Agency and the FBI jointly disclosed that North Korean hacking group WaterPlum, also known as “Contagious Interview,” has posed as recruiters and crypto firms to trick developers into running malicious code. Between December 2025 and July 2026, the group infected at least 30,000 devices across more than 100 countries and stole funds or credentials from over 7,000 crypto wallets, involving at least $10.71 million in crypto assets.
Japan NPA, FBI Expose North Korean Hackers Posing as Recruiters
The joint attribution matters less than the method: recruitment-themed social engineering is a supply-chain attack on the people who build and audit crypto systems, not on exchanges or protocols. That shifts the risk burden toward individual developers, whose compromised credentials and wallets can sit inside otherwise well-defended organizations. The cross-border device and wallet counts suggest this is industrialized rather than opportunistic. Whether similar recruiter-lure campaigns are being tracked by other agencies, and how hiring pipelines in crypto verify counterparties, is the open question.
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