The United States companies issued a joint advisory notice the world regarding the significant cyber threat professed by North Korean state-sponsored hackers to global banking and financial organizations.
The U.S. government is ready to pay up to $5 million, if you cough up useful details on North Korea’s hackers and their continuing hacking operations.
The FBI and the Departments of State, Treasury, and Homeland Security (DHS) put out an advisory about the persistent threat from cybercriminals sponsored by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
As per the joint report, "The DPRK’s ill-disposed cyber activities endanger the United States and the wider international community and, in distinct, profess an important threat to the honesty and stability of the international financial order."
The UN Security Council’s 2019 mid-term report said that dozens of suspected DPRK cyber-enabled heists were being investigated at the time.It said that the attacks had attempted to pull off about $2 billion in cyberheists. The US didn’t divulge how much of that money the cybercriminals actually got away with, though it did say that whatever money Pyongyang got its hands on has been used to develop weapons of mass destruction.
It’s got the talent to pull off those attacks and far more. In the advisory posted to US-CERT on Wednesday, the US said that the DPRK has a fully staffed set of state-sponsored cyber actors, including hackers, cryptologists, software developers who conduct espionage, and those who run politically motivated operations against foreign media companies.
North Korean cyber actors are allegedly behind extortion campaigns, including both ransomware and mobster-like protection rackets.
In the report’s list of big, dreaded, infamous cyberattacks attributed to North Korea is one such devastating ransomware: WannaCry.
In September 2018, the Justice Department (DOJ) charged a North Korea regime-backed programmer, Park Jin Hyok, with being part of a team that launched multiple cyberattacks, including the global WannaCry 2.0 attack. The ransomware spread like wildfire in May 2017, infecting hundreds of thousands of computers in hospitals, schools, businesses, and homes in over 150 countries.
The DOJ also charged him with being part of the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures and the 2016 $81m cyber heist that drained Bangladesh's central Bank.
Wednesday’s advisory also said that DPRK-sponsored cyber actors have gussied up their extortion demands by demanding protection money from victims, telling them that the “long-term paid consulting arrangements” would keep them from getting hacked. They’ve also been paid to hack websites and extort targets for third-party clients.
The UN’s Security Council said that its panel of experts was also investigating the DPRK’s use of cryptojacking : the practice of inflicting malware on gear you don’t own so you can use others’ computers and servers to mine cryptocurrency.
The experts have traced the mined assets much of it being anonymity-enhanced digital currency, or what's sometimes called privacy coins to North Korean servers. The UN report says they traced some of those coins to Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang.
The US said:" these are all ways that DPRK is using cyber activities to raise money and thereby bypass sanctions."
The US has been after DPRK-sponsored cybercriminal groups for years. One such is Hidden Cobra, also known as Lazarus Group or Guardians of Peace. It’s a well known cybercriminal group that has hacked pretty much anything and everything online.
In June 2017, US-CERT took what was then the highly unusual step of sending a stark public warning to businesses about the danger of North Korean cyberattacks and the urgent need to patch old software to defend against them.
It specifically called out Lazarus Group(Hidden Cobra) or Guardians of Peace. The alert was unusual in that it gave details, asking organizations to report any detected activity from the threat actors to Homeland Security.
Specifically, in that 2017 alert, US-CERT told organizations to be on the lookout for DDoS botnet activity, keylogging, remote access tools (RATs), and disk wiping malware, as well as malware like WannaCry.
In September 2019, the Treasury targeted North Korean hacking groups by formally sanctioning the Lazarus Group, along with its offshoots, Bluenoroff and Andariel.
The US asked for help, giving out a list of measures to counter the DPRK’s cyber threat.
Some of them are:
- Raise awareness in both the public and private sectors in order to foster preventive and risk mitigation measures.
- Share what you know. Share best practices with and between governments and the public.
- Use strong cyber security defenses. The financial industry should share threat information through government and or industry channels, segment networks to minimize risks, keep regular backups, undertake awareness training on common social engineering tactics, implement policies governing information sharing and network access, and develop cyber incident response plans.
- Report it. Tell law enforcement if your organization may have been victimized fast. Timely reporting will not only expedite investigation but may even increase chances of recovering what was stolen.
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