Fake-worker schemes have become a bigger issue as AI raises the risk of impersonation
Specops, which recently launched Specops Secure Onboarding to help organizations replace assumed identity with verified identity across first-password setup, access and service-desk support, believes that identity risk now increasingly intersects with hiring and onboarding.
Employee onboarding was built for speed, not identity assurance. In distributed hiring environments, IT may be asked to provision people it has never met, while temporary passwords, manager handoffs and service-desk requests can all rely on identity being assumed rather than verified.
As AI makes voice cloning, deepfakes and phishing attacks easier and cheaper to scale, those long-standing identity gaps are becoming harder to defend.
The 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report highlights North Korean IT worker schemes that used stolen identities and regionally hosted laptop farms to acquire jobs, estimating that these operations leveraged 15,000 possible stolen identities.
Sift also reports that AI now assists more than 82 percent of phishing emails, highlighting the growing role of AI in scalable social engineering.
For organizations, that means identity assurance can no longer start after an account has already been created. User verification must come into play at all the key points of the new-hire journey, helping confirm that the person setting a first password, receiving access or contacting the service desk is who they claim to be.
Getting onboarding digitally right
Specops’ approach: New employees set their own first Active Directory password through a secure enrollment link, verify their identity using biometric liveness detection and government-issued ID, and can be re-verified before sensitive service-desk actions are completed.
The identity check supports more than 16,000 document types across 254 countries and territories, with no end user data stored. Service-desk caller verification works inside existing ServiceNow, Jira and other ITSM workflows, with every verification logged for audit.
By giving IT, security, HR and service-desk teams one consistent approach to identity verification, organizations can reduce onboarding risk while keeping the new-hire experience simple and smooth.
“For years, organizations could afford to treat onboarding as an administrative process,” said Darren James, Senior Product Manager at Specops Software.
“But the fake-worker schemes highlighted in the Verizon DBIR show why that assumption is becoming harder to defend. Stolen identities, remote hiring processes and AI-enabled impersonation are changing where identity risk begins, which is why verification needs to start with the very first password and continue through high-risk support interactions.”
