8 October 2025, Geneva

Situation Overview

A subtle, yet significant, transformation is underway in the clandestine world of cyber espionage. Forget the old image of intelligence agents and state-run hacking teams; today, both government spy agencies and private corporations are increasingly farming out their most sensitive operations. They are no longer relying solely on tight-knit internal units. Instead, they're turning to a sprawling, decentralized marketplace of contractors, freelancers, and semi-clandestine "hack-for-hire" outfits. This burgeoning phenomenon, known as the "cyber-espionage gig economy," closely mirrors the modular, just-in-time tasking that now dominates the broader global workforce.

Why This Unseen Shift is a Game-Changer

The ramifications of this outsourcing extend far beyond the technical realm of cyber intrusion.

For starters, attribution becomes a nightmare. When multiple, jurisdiction-spanning intermediaries are involved, determining exactly who is responsible for an attack is like trying to follow a trail of smoke. Traditional deterrence, the threat of harsh retaliation against a clearly identifiable state actor, simply falls apart in this murky environment. By contracting out sensitive tasks to a third party, states achieve a valuable layer of plausible deniability, insulating themselves from direct consequence.

"Attribution today is less about smoking guns and more about smoke and mirrors. Outsourcing allows states to blur the trail until it disappears."
- Dave Venable, ISRS Chair

Moreover, the very systems that fueled the global remote-work boom, such as decentralized hiring, platform-mediated contracting, and reliance on freelancers, have inadvertently created a massive new vulnerability. Hostile states have an unprecedented opportunity to scale their espionage efforts. Consider that mainstream, globally connected companies might be unknowingly employing operators whose real bosses are in a sanctioned nation. Individuals in less restrictive countries can be coaxed into running small parts of an operation, perhaps without ever grasping their role in a hostile nation’s major espionage campaign.

The Mechanics of Gig-Economy Espionage

This mercenary model thrives on breaking down complex cyber operations into small, manageable, contractable tasks. You might have one entity handling the initial reconnaissance, a second tasked purely with achieving access, and a third specializing in the final data triage and exfiltration.

According to Jacob Williams, ISRS Advisory Council Member and Vice President of Research & Development at Hunter Strategy:

"In some cases, these cutouts may not understand the full scope of their activities. Some may even believe they are working to assess the target's security, like what occurs in a legitimate penetration test."
— Jake Williams (aka MalwareJake), ISRS Advisory Council

Brokers are the key coordinating figures, often operating through front companies designed to look like innocent HR or due diligence firms. A particularly striking example was Iran’s "VIP Human Solutions," which didn't hire people but instead hunted them. It pretended to be a recruiting company while actually functioning as a counterintelligence tool to unmask hostile spies. A clever flip of the script.

Case Studies Confirm the Trend

• The i-Soon Leak: The 2024 document cache from this Chinese contractor offered a startling, unvarnished look into this semi-official world. It confirmed a structured market where contractors competed for government work, advertised specialized hacking skills, and maintained detailed price lists, suggesting the outsourcing model is deeply institutionalized within Chinese security services.
  
  Recorded Future concluded: "The leak offers an unprecedented glimpse inside the inner workings of China’s cyber-espionage ecosystem and represents the most significant leak of data linked to a company suspected of providing targeted intrusion services for Chinese security services."
  
  

• North Korea's Remote Ruse: Pyongyang exploits the normalization of distributed work, creating "laptop farms" and using remote contractors, often with stolen or rented Western identities, to secure high-paying jobs inside American and European corporate IT infrastructures. The salaries, of course, are funneled directly back to the regime, creating a massive, illicit revenue stream.
  
  As the U.S. Department of Justice noted: “the schemes involve North Korean individuals fraudulently obtaining employment with U.S. companies as remote IT workers, using stolen and fake identities.”
  
  

• The Tooling Economy: Running alongside this labor market is a parallel marketplace for weaponry. Commercial spyware vendors like Cytrox, Candiru, and Predator offer plug-and-play intrusion packages to anyone with the cash, from intelligence agencies to private law firms. Major tech companies like Meta and Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) have repeatedly exposed these operations, demonstrating how the line between private intelligence and state-directed espionage is becoming dangerously blurry.
  
  Meta has publicly removed surveillance-for-hire firms, stating that their targets included journalists, activists, opposition politicians, among others, underscoring how pervasive and non-discriminatory such services can be.
  
  

• India’s Appin Network: Investigations into the Indian firm Appin and its alumni exposed one of the earliest and most persistent hack-for-hire ecosystems. Operating under the guise of training institutes and security consultancies, Appin-linked contractors carried out espionage for corporate clients, law firms, and political actors across the globe. Despite injunctions and reputational fallout, the network demonstrated how commercial intrusion services could persist for years by constantly rebranding, highlighting that the cyber-espionage gig economy is not confined to authoritarian regimes but also thrives in democratic markets where oversight is weaker.

Strategic and Corporate Exposure

The diffusion of espionage through this gig economy lens fundamentally upends international security assumptions. Policymakers face a brutal problem: it's not just about attributing the attack; it's about establishing accountability. If the state merely purchases the service, does sanctioning a small, easily dissolved contractor firm really matter? New cutouts can materialize overnight.

For private enterprises, the risk profile has changed dramatically. They're no longer just worried about a sophisticated external technical breach; the threat has been internalized. Their own remote hiring and vendor contracting practices are now a potential vulnerability. Insufficient identity verification, combined with the rise of remote work, enables hostile actors to infiltrate legitimate supply chains as regular employees. Crucially, the threat has shifted from the corporate network perimeter to the cloud identity perimeter. A compromised contractor's credentials can provide an attacker with privileged access to critical SaaS applications or underlying cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, etc.), the ultimate prize for data exfiltration and long-term espionage. This exposure, especially when tied to sanctioned regimes like North Korea's, represents a severe and new category of strategic risk for any global company.

Strategic Implications

The emergence of a cyber-espionage gig economy reshapes not only how operations are conducted but also how states, enterprises, and societies must think about risk. Four implications stand out.

Erosion of Deterrence and Accountability

Classic deterrence models assumed clear chains of command and state attribution. By farming out tasks to contractors and cutouts, states gain insulation from consequence. Sanctioning or indicting a single firm or freelancer is largely symbolic when new entities can be spun up overnight. This dynamic blunts the effectiveness of traditional punitive tools and forces governments to reconsider how they impose costs in the grey zone.

Expansion of the Attack Surface

The very systems that power global business, remote work, decentralized hiring, and freelance contracting now provide adversaries with placement opportunities. Companies that believe themselves outside the scope of nation-state espionage may nonetheless find hostile actors embedded inside their supply chains or even their payrolls. Strategic risk management can no longer treat cyber intrusion as solely “outside in”; the threat vector now includes insiders who never set foot inside a target’s office.

Normalization of Espionage as a Service

The commercial spyware industry exemplifies how espionage is being packaged and sold like any other digital service. As more actors, from authoritarian regimes to law firms and political operatives, avail themselves of these tools, espionage is becoming commodified. This normalizes the practice, lowers the barrier for mid-tier players, and erodes the distinction between statecraft and private contracting. The long-term risk is a fragmented international order in which espionage is not an exceptional activity of states, but an accessible marketplace commodity with few enforceable norms.

“When espionage is as easy as a rideshare, the shadow market doesn’t just threaten governments—it endangers every corporation on Earth.”
- Brigham McCown, ISRS Board Member

The Unregulated Financial Engine

The shadow market is fundamentally powered by cryptocurrency, which acts as the perfect transactional lubricant. By leveraging decentralized payment rails, including privacy-focused cryptocurrencies and sophisticated chain-hopping techniques, states and mercenary firms can pay global contractors instantly while bypassing traditional financial sanctions and AML/KYC enforcement. This robustly insulates the "hack-for-hire" model, creating a truly global and stateless flow of illicit funds.

Where We Go From Here

The trajectory for the cyber-espionage gig economy is unmistakably upward. Several developments are likely to accelerate its growth and complexity.

AI Acceleration

The integration of AI into hiring pipelines and digital identity generation will supercharge the ability of hostile actors to create synthetic résumés, deepfake interviews, and convincing digital personas. This will further erode confidence in remote hiring systems and make infiltration harder to detect.

More Leaks and Exposures

The i-Soon documents were likely only the beginning. Additional leaks, indictments, or investigative reports will continue to reveal contractor ecosystems tied not only to China but also to Russia, India, and Middle Eastern actors. Each revelation will further map the contours of this shadow market, but also demonstrate how resilient and replaceable these structures are.

Platform Governance

Major technology companies, including Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, are increasingly functioning as de facto regulators of the espionage marketplace. Through takedowns, transparency reports, and cross-platform attribution, they have become central to shaping the costs and visibility of mercenary vendors. This trend will continue, positioning platforms as reluctant but powerful arbiters of espionage norms.

Recommendations

To meet this evolving challenge, governments, enterprises, and civil society must act in concert.

For Governments

States must treat contractor ecosystems as organized criminal enterprises, not just technical adjuncts to adversary intelligence agencies. Recent U.S. indictments against executives and personnel associated with contractors like i-Soon, as well as Treasury sanctions targeting specific Chinese data brokers, validate this operational shift. This strategy requires pairing indictments with secondary sanctions on facilitators such as identity brokers, device farms, and payment rails. International cooperation should expand beyond information sharing to include joint enforcement actions, asset seizures, and naming-and-shaming campaigns to raise reputational costs.

For Enterprises

Companies need to harden their remote hiring pipelines and vendor due diligence processes. Document checks are no longer sufficient. Enterprises should implement continuous identity verification, device binding, and geo-telemetry alerts to detect anomalies. Third-party contracts must explicitly forbid further subcontracting of sensitive tasks, and compliance should be tested with red-team style audits. Executives, legal teams, and high-value employees must be prioritized for targeted training, as they are prime candidates for mercenary tasking.

For Platforms and Civil Society

Coordinated transparency is the most effective countermeasure against a shadow market that thrives on secrecy. Platforms should continue publishing infrastructure indicators, naming spyware vendors, and exposing client typologies. Civil society and independent research labs play a crucial role in amplifying these disclosures, ensuring that mercenary operations cannot remain hidden behind commercial or legal facades.

Conclusion

The cyber-espionage gig economy represents a profound shift in the practice of intelligence and the structure of global risk. By externalizing operations through a decentralized market of contractors, states gain deniability, enterprises face internalized threats, and espionage itself becomes a commodified service available to the highest bidder.

As ISRS Chair Dave Venable observed: “The gig economy has come to espionage, and it’s changing the game: It’s cheaper, faster, and harder to trace.  This makes it a strategic problem, not just a technical one.”

Managing this transformation requires moving beyond traditional deterrence and adopting strategies that blend law enforcement, financial sanctions, platform governance, and enterprise resilience. Left unchecked, this market will not only expand but normalize—turning espionage from an extraordinary tool of statecraft into a ubiquitous industry of global intrigue.

The question is no longer whether espionage will be outsourced, but how far and how fast—and whether democratic societies can adapt before the shadow market becomes the new normal.