Since last August, attackers have been pretending to be recruiters from Palo Alto Networks. People who have been affected are asked to pay between $400 and $800 to get their résumé out of a bureaucratic hold-up. In a blog post about the scam, Unit 42 senior manager Justin Moore said that these scams hurt the real hiring process by taking advantage of "the complexity of modern hiring."

The fake offers come with three different prices: $400 for executive ATS alignment, $600 for leadership positioning, and $800 for an end-to-end executive rewrite. Moore said that cybercriminals often use phishing scams to lure people in with what look like real job offers. This makes it more likely that someone will fall for the scam.

He went on to say that North Korean hackers, especially Lazarus, are known for running fake job recruitment campaigns like "Dream Jobs" and others to get information and do other bad things. Moore said that the scam is "a frivolous attempt to exploit your professional ambitions" and should be seen as "a fraudulent attempt to exploit your professional ambition" and make money. Moore wrote that this can hurt the victims' finances and the organizations that were impersonated.

He wrote that the attack vector uses social engineering to create a bureaucratic barrier around the candidate's curriculum vitae (CV) and push them to do things like pay to have their resumes reformatted.

In the post, he told potential candidates that Palo Palo Networks would never ask them to pay for résumé optimization services. He also said that the company is "committed to a transparent and ethical hiring process." Moore said it's important to be on the lookout for these kinds of scams because they can hurt your professional reputation.