North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus is believed to be behind a recent crypto jacking attack on several banks with an unexpected twist–the use of a Trojan that tricked a company employee into downloading malware, according to Kaspersky Lab.
A late-2017 state-sponsored cyber attacks by North Korea against South Korea not only targeted cryptocurrency users and exchanges, but also college students interested in foreign affairs, new research from Recorded Future has found.
The New York Times claims that the U.S. National Security Agency used intelligence gleaned from a clandestine operation to compromise North Korea’s cyber warfare unit to pin the blame for the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack on the reclusive Communist country. According to the story by David Sanger and Martin Fackler, the Obama Administration’s decision to quickly blame the hack on the DPRK grew out of a four year-old National Security Agency (NSA) program that compromise Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the outside world. The classified NSA program eventually placed malware that could track the internal workings of the computers and networks used by the North’s hackers and under the control of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the North Korean intelligence unit, and Bureau 121, the North’s hacking unit, which mostly operates out of China. It has long been recognized that North Korea, which lacks a mature information technology infrastructure, does much of […]
The news keeps coming out of South Korea, where a mysterious rash of hacks and virus infections early Thursday compromised tens of thousands of machines running at banks, broadcasters and other firms, erasing data and causing widespread disruption. Here’s the latest: South Korean Officials “Strongly Suspect” North Korea South Korean government officials made their most direct statements to date (albeit anonymously) on the possible source of the attack, saying that they had a “strong suspicion” that the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was responsible. Speaking to the YonHap News Agency, the official, identified as a “high ranking official in the office of President Cheong Wa Dae,” refused to elaborate. However, he may have been referring to the preliminary results of the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) which traced the malicious code responsible for crippling computers at broadcasters and banks to an IP address in China. South Korean […]
Editor’s Note: Updated to include information from AlienVault on the attacks. – PFR 3/20/2013 Destructive cyber attacks against media outlets and banks in South Korea have ratcheted up tensions on the Korean Peninsula, with charges that the government of reclusive North Korea was behind the hacks. According to a report in South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, the attacks began at 2:00PM local time in South Korea and affected the computer networks of three broadcasters and two banks. Broadcasters KBS, MBC and YTN all reported that their computer networks were “halted” at that time. Shinhan Bank and Nonghyup made similar reports to the National Police Agency (NPA), according to Yonhap. Unlike past distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that are believed to have been launched by the DPRK against the South, the latest incursions come at a time of extreme military tension on the peninsula, and caused damages to South Korean […]
