EP 136 Hiring the Enemy? Is Your applicant a Trojan Horse? Former CIA Operative: Nick Gicinto Explains How a Bad Hire can Literally be Hiring your Hacker

The Security Circle

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🔐 Top 5 Things This Podcast Unpacks

1. 🚩 The Rise of Fake Identities in Remote Hiring
   Nation-state actors — particularly from North Korea — are using stolen or fabricated identities to secure legitimate remote IT roles inside Western organisations, bypassing traditional recruitment filters.
2. 🎭 Deepfakes and Digital Deception
   From AI-generated avatars to fake GitHub profiles and forged documentation, adversaries are creating sophisticated personas that fool even seasoned HR professionals and background checkers.
3. 💼 How Insider Threats Start at the Interview
   The episode explores how the threat doesn’t walk through your front door anymore — it logs in from halfway across the world. Hiring is now a critical attack vector.
4. 🛑 Why Zero Trust Must Extend Beyond Networks
   It’s not just about access controls or segmentation — zero trust thinking needs to be embedded in people processes too, especially during recruitment and onboarding.
5. 🎯 Real-World Case Studies of High-Stakes Infiltration
   Nick shares real examples where threat actors embedded themselves in organisations, stole cryptocurrency, accessed sensitive code, and even touched on national defense data — all under the guise of being a “remote developer.”

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-gicinto/

BIO

Executive security leader and veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Tesla, and Uber as an insider threat, intelligence and security specialist. Successfully developed Uber, Tesla, and Chainlink Labs’ first global intelligence collections, investigations, and insider threat programs from the ground up.
Now, CISO at William Jewell College and Professor of Practice in Cybersecurity, a new major at WJC.

Security Circle ⭕️ is an IFPOD production for IFPO the International Foundation of Protection Officers