Chollima Hunter

천리마 사냥꾼

A free, public index tracking North Korea's cyber operations.

What's a Chollima?

  1. 천cheona thousand
  2. 리ria Korean unit of distance, about 0.4 km (a quarter mile)
  3. 마mahorse

The thousand-ri horse: a winged horse from Korean legend, said to cover a thousand ri (about 400 km) in a day. North Korea made it a national symbol of speed, and a Chollima statue still stands over Pyongyang.

Security firm CrowdStrike names North Korea's hacking groups after it. This site hunts them.

How the scheme works

  1. 1

    Build a fake developer

    A stolen or AI-made photo, an invented CV, and GitHub and LinkedIn accounts to match.

  2. 2

    Get hired remotely

    Pass the interviews, often with help from people abroad who receive the work laptop and keep it online.

  3. 3

    Send it home

    The salary goes to the regime. The access can be used to steal code, data or crypto.

It also runs the other way: fake recruiters send real developers a "coding test" that installs malware. Researchers call that Contagious Interview.

Use it

Who's behind it

Not freelance criminals. A state program, run by three arms of the North Korean government.

The North Korean state

Not placed: Konni, and PolinRider, a campaign reported as merged with the IT-worker cluster.

Mapping per Sekoia (September 2026), which records the agencies' 2026 names. North Korea reorganises these units often, and researchers disagree on where some groups sit; where a profile names a unit, its own citation is the authority.

Meet the groups

Each one opens its own page: what it does, what a defender would see, and the research worth reading.

All profiles

Disclaimer Every claim here comes from a cited public record, and confidence levels reflect the source's own characterisation rather than a determination by this site. See the sourcing methodology. If something looks inaccurate or unfairly sourced, flag it via Submit IOC/Profile.