North Korea attempts to hack banks worldwide to steal money
NORTH KOREA is behind an increasingly orchestrated effort at hacking into computers of financial institutions in South Korea and around the world to steal cash for the impoverished country, a South Korean state-backed agency said in a report.
Express.co.uk
Fri, Jul 28, 2017
In the past, suspected hacking attempts by North Korea appeared intended to cause social disruption or steal classified military or government data, but the focus seems to have shifted in recent years to raising foreign currency, the South’s Financial Security Institute (FSI) said.
The isolated regime is suspected to be behind a hacking group called Lazarus, which global cybersecurity firms have linked to last year’s $81 million cyber heist at the Bangladesh central bank and the 2014 attack on Sony’s Hollywood studio.
The U.S. government has blamed North Korea for the Sony hack and some U.S. officials have said prosecutors are building a case against Pyongyang in the Bangladesh Bank theft.
In April, Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab also identified a hacking group called Bluenoroff, a spin off of Lazarus, as focused on attacking mostly foreign financial institutions.
The new report, which analysed suspected cyber attacks between 2015 and 2017 on South Korean government and commercial institutions, identified another Lazarus spinoff named Andariel.
“Bluenoroff and Andariel share their common root, but they have different targets and motives,” the report said.
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