Coinbase tightens security after North Korean threat, mandates U.S. citizenship for sensitive roles

Coinbase is changing its rules. After discovering that North Korean tech workers tried to use the company’s remote work policy to gain access to internal systems, the crypto exchange is locking things down.

CEO Brian Armstrong said during a new episode of Stripe president John Collison’s podcast “Cheeky Pint” that the threats are real and nonstop. “It feels like there’s 500 new people graduating every quarter from some kind of school they have – that’s just their whole job,” Brian said, according to the podcast released Wednesday.

To block these attempts, Coinbase is now forcing all new hires to travel to the U.S. for in-person orientation. Anyone applying for a job that touches sensitive systems must be a U.S. citizen. They must also submit fingerprints. Brian said this is no longer optional because bad actors are working harder than ever to get in.

This update comes weeks after the FBI issued a public warning about North Korean IT workers trying to slip into U.S. companies to make money for Kim Jong-un’s regime. The FBI said these workers often operate with the help of Americans, some who know exactly what they’re doing, others who don’t. These helpers have been caught reshipping laptops, faking interviews, and even building fake businesses.

Coinbase tracks down inside threats and builds U.S. support base

The problem goes even deeper than fake job applicants. Brian said Coinbase has seen actual customer service agents being offered huge bribes just to snap a photo of internal documents.

“Threat actors” have offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to employees in exchange for access to sensitive information. To fight this, the company has limited what workers can even see.

Brian said they’ve made consequences painfully clear. “When we catch people, we don’t walk them out the door; they go to jail,” he said. “And we try to make it very clear that you’re destroying the rest of your life by taking this, even if you think, whatever, it is a life-changing amount of money, it’s not worth going to jail.”

Coinbase is also trying to cut down on these problems by building up its support team inside the country. Brian said they’ve opened a new customer service facility in Charlotte, North Carolina. “We’ve started growing U.S.-based support,” he told Collison.

With AI deepfakes and other tools making fraud easier, Brian said it’s becoming more important to confirm someone’s actual presence. Video interviews are now mandatory for job applicants. Cameras must stay on. 

He said the company checks to make sure the person being interviewed is real, not AI-generated, and not being coached off-screen. Collison said that “proof of physical presence” might become a standard again in this new age of cybercrime.

USD1 stablecoin lands on listing roadmap after Trump connection

Coinbase is also adding a politically charged token to its listing roadmap. The USD1 stablecoin from World Liberty Financial is now on track to be listed. But Brian made it clear that trading won’t go live until there’s enough technical support and liquidity.

This comes after Brian backed Donald Trump’s return to the White House. The CEO personally donated to Trump’s 2024 campaign. That financial tie was followed by the exchange putting Trump-backed USD1 on its radar.

The token itself isn’t small. World Liberty recently minted another $205 million worth of USD1 to add to its treasury. That brings the total supply up to $2.4 billion. A huge part of that came from MGX, an Abu Dhabi investment firm that signed a $2 billion deal with a major crypto exchange. That deal pumped most of the current USD1 supply into the market.