Social Engineering your Hiring Process: Adding Value to your Pen Test

In today’s remote-first talent market, state-sponsored threat actors are skipping the phishing email and walking straight through the front door—by getting hired. Treasury sanctions issued in January and July 2025 exposed a wide-ranging network of North Korean IT contractors who used fabricated identities to secure roles at Fortune-ranked companies, funneling salaries, source-code access, and privileged credentials to hacking units such as Lazarus and Andariel. Their success marks a strategic shift: the hiring pipeline itself is now a primary attack vector, and routine background checks or vendor screenings are no longer enough. This spotlight session will show what’s truly at stake when the next “remote developer” is a nation-state beachhead.

A Hiring-Process Penetration Test is an end-to-end, red-teaming service that stress-tests recruiters, tooling, and SOPs with the same tradecraft adversaries use. Live-fire simulations expose policy gaps, social-engineering weak points and technical bypasses across applicant tracking, identity verification and onboarding.

Attendees will learn the measurable outcomes produced by this test: a maturity scorecard, a heat-mapped attack surface of the talent pipeline and a prioritized remediation roadmap tied to business risk. By the end of the session, you’ll know exactly which questions to bring back to HR, Legal and Finance—and how to keep the adversary off payroll and out of your network. 

IANS Service Spotlight Webinars highlight leading topics within information security and the tactical ways to address those challenges. Our Faculty of industry experts provide the breadth and depth of information to guide you as you tackle daily security challenges, while highlighting how IANS services can support your efforts. Leveraging the IANS Faculty and community, we will illustrate the approach and tools your peers are using to address today’s most pressing concerns.