The scheme involved thousands of workers who were dispatched by the North Korean government to find work as remote IT employees at American companies.

The foreign IT workers obtained sensitive information from US companies’ servers, the department said. One of those companies is an unnamed California-based defense contractor that specializes in

“These schemes target and steal from U.S. companies and are designed to evade sanctions and fund the North Korean regime’s illicit programs, including its weapons programs,” Assistant Attorney General John Eisenberg, the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a statement.