Comment by alganet a day ago
Is your company involved in infrastructural or emerging tech in any way?
Forgive my frankness, but these worries about infiltrators have priority in important, large companies. I am very sure agencies responsible for this can contact these handful of important companies directly.
So, you're right. In the current age we live in, no one cares about your small SaaS company, and you're being used to spread unecessary paranoia and fear.
You do hire remote workers, don't you?
If you had to hire workers in office, would you have space and infrastructure for all of them?
From my perspective, this would solve the issue. Unless you're worried about in-person north korea spies.
I don't know man, seems like you're living in some cold war mind trap or something.
Greed meets greed. Companies hiring cheap labor, being exploited in several fronts.
It was a decision for several companies to spread thin their offshore hiring. They practically invited infiltrators in.
Keep focused. Small companies never mattered for nations, they are irrelevant. Spreading paranoia will not solve their over-reliance on this exploited offshore problem. It will likely lead them to bankrupcy.
Ultimately, it doesn't invalidate what I said. It actually makes my comment more relevant.
> It was a decision for several companies to spread thin their offshore hiring. They practically invited infiltrators in.
It's not offshore. Infiltrators are pretending that they're in the US. I first saw this 2 years ago, and they were pretty clumsy back then: always blurred background (and refusing to unblur it) and/or doing calls from a windowless office. You could even see their eyes moving, like they're reading the script.
This year they became much fancier. They use backgrounds with the real time-of-day and weather illumination. The eyes no longer move unnaturally, etc.
You miss the point.
Remote working is in the same vein as offshoring. One enables the other, they're co-dependent. Both are based on greed. In the case of remote working, is avoiding having offices, avoiding paying certain kinds of insurance, etc.
You are also re-inforcing my original conclusion that what enables these workers is the very same tech that companies are investing on.
Again, greed meets greed.
Now it's too late. IT companies will not survive a full return to office, and they won't survive remote working as well.
The very idea that someone could be using technology to fake an identity was unthinkable. Now that it is not, there's really no place safe.
If a crisis occours, and the US president goes to Air Force 1, transmits from there, how could you be sure he's not a north korean infiltrator? You can't.
I think there are still ways out of this, but we're reaching an inflection point that will be hard to overcome.
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Your commentary seems to provide a valid point of view, and although you disagree, you reinforce my main point.
Other company was, indeed, AI Startup #528532.
We're in a niche, extremely boring industry. We have an extremely small client base. We do line-of-business/sales management applications for something akin to like... light switches and light fixtures. The most exclusive thing we have access to is wholesale pricing from manufacturers. We don't handle payments. The extent of PII we handle is "name and email" from when someone emails out a quote.
We are the epitome of uninteresting to a foreign actor. Being "uninteresting" apparently does not disqualify you.
We also do not hire overseas (the applicant claimed to be from California) and offer a good US wage. We weren't targeted or vulnerable because we were being "greedy".