Dimitris Glynos

My CISO called me at 3 AM last Tuesday. "We caught someone." I asked, "Caught them doing what?" He said, "Typing." Let me explain. We have an employee in IT. Great worker. Always online. Never complained. Perfect Slack etiquette. One problem. His keystrokes were arriving 110 milliseconds late. One hundred and ten milliseconds. That's 0.11 seconds. The average American remote worker has 20-40ms of latency. This guy? 110ms. Every. Single. Keystroke. My security team ran the numbers. That latency doesn't come from a bad router in Ohio. That latency comes from Pyongyang. Our "Senior DevOps Engineer" was a North Korean operative. Running his work laptop through a laptop farm. In America. While he worked from a government building. In North Korea. He passed the interview. He passed the background check. He passed the vibe check. He did not pass the speed of light. Here's what people don't understand about physics: Light travels 186,000 miles per second. But it still has to go through China. And China adds latency. Since April, Amazon has caught 1,800 of these attempts. Eighteen hundred. I called an emergency meeting with my board. I said, "We need to implement Keystroke Velocity Auditing across all remote employees." They said, "That sounds invasive." I said, "You know what else is invasive? The Democratic People's Republic of Korea in your Jira tickets." They approved the budget. We now monitor keystroke timing to the microsecond. If your latency exceeds 60ms, you get a call from HR. If it exceeds 100ms, you get a call from the FBI. We've already flagged 47 employees. Turns out 44 of them just have bad Wi-Fi. 3 of them are "still under investigation." The lesson? You can fake a resume. You can fake a background check. You can fake an American accent on Zoom. But you cannot fake the speed of light. Physics is the ultimate background check. Hire accordingly.