SEOUL - North Korean IT workers, who are forced to work for the Kim Jong-un regime to generate illegal revenue, must endure gruelling conditions, strict surveillance and intense pressure to meet brutal workload quotas just to get paid, according to a report released by a human rights organisation.

The report, written by Pscore, a Seoul-based non-governmental organisation advocating for human rights in North Korea, highlighted the need to recognise North Korean tech workers as victims of serious human rights abuses under the Kim regime, shifting the conventional focus away from the illicit revenue they generate.

“It is critical to recognise these IT workers as victims of North Korea’s cyber agenda,” underscored the Pscore report titled Decoding Crimes: Unveiling North Korea’s Cyber Threats, which was presented on March 13 during an event on North Korean human rights hosted by the Canadian Embassy in Seoul.

The report provides a rare glimpse into a dismal reality for North Korean IT workers, based on in-person interviews in 2024 with pseudonymously named North Korean defectors who were formerly IT employees and professionals.

“Due to their precarious working and living conditions, we believe that even the regime’s highly skilled workers are deprived of various human rights,” Ms Jasmin Ringel, a researcher at Pscore, explained during the event.

The report was one of the projects supported by the Embassy of Canada Fund for Human Rights in North Korea as part of Canada’s efforts to promote human rights in the country.

The report disclosed that North Korean IT workers typically work over 10 hours daily, often overnight, to serve international clients across time zones, resulting in sleep deprivation and irregular routines.

Workers live in cramped accommodations, with five to six workers from the same project team sharing small spaces. Their movement is severely restricted, limited to one daily walk and an occasional outing once a week.

“We sleep a bit during the day, and since it’s a system where we work during the nighttime, you do assignments through the internet at night and continue to develop (them) during the day,” Mr Kang Ju-won, a former North Korean IT worker who developed programs overseas in South-east Asia, said of his work routine in an interview with Pscore in October 2024.

Mr Kim Ji-min, a North Korean defector and IT expert, pointed out how stress and pressure to perform at the workplace greatly affect the mental health ...