North Korean Hacker | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The North Korean advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Kimsuky has been observed using a piece of custom malware called RandomQuery as part of a reconnaissance and information exfiltration operation. "Lately, Kimsuky has been consistently distributing custom malware as part of reconnaissance campaigns to enable subsequent attacks," SentinelOne researchers Aleksandar Milenkoski and Tom Hegel said in a report published today. The ongoing targeted campaign, per the cybersecurity firm, is primarily geared towards information services as well as organizations supporting human rights activists and North Korean defectors. Kimsuky, active since 2012, has exhibited targeting patterns that align with North Korea's operational mandates and priorities. The intelligence collection missions have involved the use of a diverse set of malware, including another reconnaissance program called ReconShark , as detailed by SentinelOne earlier this month. The latest activity

The North Korean threat actor known as  ScarCruft  started experimenting with oversized LNK files as a delivery route for RokRAT malware as early as July 2022, the same month Microsoft  began blocking macros  across Office documents by default. "RokRAT has not changed significantly over the years, but its deployment methods have evolved, now utilizing archives containing LNK files that initiate multi-stage infection chains," Check Point  said  in a new technical report. "This is another representation of a major trend in the threat landscape, where APTs and cybercriminals alike attempt to overcome the blocking of macros from untrusted sources." ScarCruft , also known by the names APT37, InkySquid, Nickel Foxcroft, Reaper, RedEyes, and Ricochet Chollima, is a threat group that almost exclusively targets South Korean individuals and entities as part of spear-phishing attacks designed to deliver an array of custom tools. The adversarial collective, unlike the  La

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Lazarus, the prolific North Korean hacking group behind the cascading  supply chain attack targeting 3CX , also breached two critical infrastructure organizations in the power and energy sector and two other businesses involved in financial trading using the trojanized X_TRADER application. The new findings, which come courtesy of  Symantec's Threat Hunter Team , confirm earlier suspicions that the X_TRADER application compromise affected more organizations than 3CX. The names of the organizations were not revealed. Eric Chien, director of security response at Broadcom-owned Symantec, told The Hacker News in a statement that the attacks took place between September 2022 and November 2022. "The impact from these infections is unknown at this time – more investigation is required and is on-going," Chien said, adding it's possible that there's "likely more to this story and possibly even other packages that are trojanized." The development comes as Ma

The supply chain attack targeting 3CX was the result of a prior supply chain compromise associated with a different company, demonstrating a new level of sophistication with North Korean threat actors. Google-owned Mandiant, which is  tracking  the attack event under the moniker  UNC4736 ,  said  the incident marks the first time it has seen a "software supply chain attack lead to another software supply chain attack." The Matryoshka doll-style cascading attack against 3CX first came to light on March 29, 2023, when it  emerged  that Windows and macOS versions of its communication software were trojanized to deliver a C/C++-based data miner named ICONIC Stealer by means of a downloader, SUDDENICON, that used icon files hosted on GitHub to extract the server containing the stealer. "The malicious application next attempts to steal sensitive information from the victim user's web browser," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  said

German and South Korean government agencies have warned about cyber attacks mounted by a threat actor tracked as  Kimsuky  using rogue browser extensions to steal users' Gmail inboxes. The  joint advisory   comes  from Germany's domestic intelligence apparatus, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), and South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS). The intrusions are designed to strike "experts on the Korean Peninsula and North Korea issues" through spear-phishing campaigns, the agencies noted. Kimsuky , also known Black Banshee, Thallium, and Velvet Chollima, refers to a  subordinate element  within North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau and is known to "collect strategic intelligence on geopolitical events and negotiations affecting the DPRK's interests." Primary targets of interest include entities in the U.S. and South Korea, particularly singling out individuals working within the government, military

Norwegian police agency Økokrim has announced the seizure of 60 million NOK (about $5.84 million) worth of cryptocurrency stolen by the Lazarus Group in March 2022 following the Axie Infinity Ronin Bridge hack. "This case shows that we also have a great capacity to follow the money on the blockchain, even if the criminals use advanced methods," the Oslo-based crime-fighting unit  said  in a statement. The development comes more than 10 months after the U.S. Treasury Department  implicated  the North Korea-backed hacking group for the theft of $620 million from the Ronin cross-chain bridge. Then in September 2022, the U.S. government  announced  the recovery of more than $30 million worth of cryptocurrency, representing 10% of the stolen funds. Økokrim said it worked with international law enforcement partners to pursue and piece together the money trail, thereby making it more difficult for criminal actors to carry out money laundering activities. "This is money th

Suspected North Korean nation-state actors targeted a journalist in South Korea with a malware-laced Android app as part of a social engineering campaign. The findings come from South Korea-based non-profit Interlab, which coined the new malware  RambleOn . The malicious functionalities include the "ability to read and leak target's contact list, SMS, voice call content, location and others from the time of compromise on the target," Interlab threat researcher Ovi Liber  said  in a report published this week. The spyware camouflages as a secure chat app called Fizzle ( ch.seme ), but in reality, acts as a conduit to deliver a next-stage payload hosted on pCloud and Yandex. The chat app is said to have been sent as an Android Package (APK) file over WeChat to the targeted journalist on December 7, 2022, under the pretext of wanting to discuss a sensitive topic. The primary purpose of RambleOn is to function as a loader for another APK file ( com.data.WeCoin ) while

The North Korea-linked threat actor tracked as  APT37  has been linked to a piece of new malware dubbed  M2RAT  in attacks targeting its southern counterpart, suggesting continued evolution of the group's features and tactics. APT37, also tracked under the monikers Reaper, RedEyes, Ricochet Chollima, and ScarCruft, is an element within North Korea's Ministry of State Security (MSS) unlike the Lazarus and Kimsuky threat clusters that are part of the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB). According to Google-owned Mandiant, MSS is tasked with "domestic counterespionage and overseas counterintelligence activities," with APT37's attack campaigns reflective of the agency's priorities. The operations have historically singled out individuals such as defectors and human rights activists. "APT37's assessed primary mission is covert intelligence gathering in support of DPRK's strategic military, political, and economic interests," the threat intelli

State-backed hackers from North Korea are conducting ransomware attacks against healthcare and critical infrastructure facilities to fund illicit activities, U.S. and South Korean cybersecurity and intelligence agencies warned in a joint advisory. The attacks, which demand cryptocurrency ransoms in exchange for recovering access to encrypted files, are designed to support North Korea's national-level priorities and objectives. This includes "cyber operations targeting the United States and South Korea governments — specific targets include Department of Defense Information Networks and Defense Industrial Base member networks," the authorities  said . Threat actors with North Korea have been  linked  to  espionage ,  financial theft , and cryptojacking operations for years, including the infamous  WannaCry ransomware attacks  of 2017 that infected hundreds of thousands of machines located in over 150 countries. Since then, North Korean nation-state crews have dabbled

A new intelligence gathering campaign linked to the prolific North Korean state-sponsored Lazarus Group leveraged known security flaws in unpatched Zimbra devices to compromise victim systems. That's according to Finnish cybersecurity company WithSecure (formerly F-Secure), which codenamed the incident No Pineapple in reference to an error message that's used in one of the backdoors. Targets of the malicious operation included a healthcare research organization in India, the chemical engineering department of a leading research university, as well as a manufacturer of technology used in the energy, research, defense, and healthcare sectors, suggesting an attempt to breach the supply chain. Roughly 100GB of data is estimated to have been exported by the hacking crew following the compromise of an unnamed customer, with the digital break-in likely taking place in the third quarter of 2022. "The threat actor gained access to the network by exploiting a vulnerable Zimbra

The North Korea-backed Lazarus Group has been observed deploying a Windows rootkit by taking advantage of an exploit in a Dell firmware driver, highlighting new tactics adopted by the state-sponsored adversary. The Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver ( BYOVD ) attack, which took place in the autumn of 2021, is another variant of the threat actor's espionage-oriented activity called Operation In(ter)ception  that's directed against aerospace and defense industries. "The campaign started with spear-phishing emails containing malicious Amazon-themed documents and targeted an employee of an aerospace company in the Netherlands, and a political journalist in Belgium," ESET researcher Peter Kálnai  said . Attack chains unfolded upon the opening of the lure documents, leading to the distribution of malicious droppers that were trojanized versions of open source projects, corroborating recent reports from Google's  Mandiant  and  Microsoft . ESET said it uncovered evid

A threat with a North Korea nexus has been found leveraging a "novel spear phish methodology" that involves making use of trojanized versions of the PuTTY SSH and Telnet client. Google-owned threat intelligence firm Mandiant attributed the new campaign to an emerging threat cluster it tracks under the name  UNC4034 . "UNC4034 established communication with the victim over WhatsApp and lured them to download a malicious ISO package regarding a fake job offering that led to the deployment of the AIRDRY.V2 backdoor through a trojanized instance of the PuTTY utility," Mandiant researchers  said . The utilization of fabricated job lures as a pathway for malware distribution is an oft-used tactic by North Korean state-sponsored actors, including the Lazarus Group, as part of an enduring campaign called  Operation Dream Job . The entry point of the attack is an ISO file that masquerades as an Amazon Assessment as part of a potential job opportunity at the tech giant.

A malicious campaign mounted by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group  targeted energy providers around the world, including those based in the United States, Canada, and Japan, between February and July 2022. "The campaign is meant to infiltrate organizations around the world for establishing long-term access and subsequently exfiltrating data of interest to the adversary's nation-state," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Some elements of the espionage attacks have already entered public domain, courtesy of prior reports from Broadcom-owned  Symantec  and  AhnLab  earlier this April and May. Symantec attributed the operation to a group referred to as Stonefly, a Lazarus subgroup which is better known as Andariel, Guardian of Peace, OperationTroy, and Silent Chollima. While these attacks previously led to the instrumentation of Preft (aka Dtrack) and NukeSped (aka Manuscrypt) implants, the latest attack wave is notable for employing two other pieces of mal

The prolific North Korean nation-state actor known as the Lazarus Group has been linked to a new remote access trojan called  MagicRAT . The previously unknown piece of malware is said to have been deployed in victim networks that had been initially breached via successful exploitation of internet-facing VMware Horizon servers, Cisco Talos said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "While being a relatively simple RAT capability-wise, it was built with recourse to the  Qt Framework , with the sole intent of making human analysis harder, and automated detection through machine learning and heuristics less likely," Talos researchers Jung soo An, Asheer Malhotra, and Vitor Ventura  said . Lazarus Group , also known as APT38, Dark Seoul, Hidden Cobra, and Zinc, refers to a cluster of financial motivated and espionage-driven  cyber activities  undertaken by the North Korean government as a means to sidestep sanctions imposed on the country and meet its strategic objectives

The North Korean nation-state group Kimusky has been linked to a new set of malicious activities directed against political and diplomatic entities located in its southern counterpart since early 2022. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky codenamed the cluster  GoldDragon , with the infection chains leading to the deployment of Windows malware designed to file lists, user keystrokes, and stored web browser login credentials. Included among the potential victims are South Korean university professors, think tank researchers, and government officials.  Kimsuky , also known as Black Banshee, Thallium, and Velvet Chollima, is the name given to a prolific North Korean advanced persistent threat (APT) group that targets entities globally, but with a primary focus on South Korea, to gain intelligence on various topics of interest to the regime. Known to be operating since 2012, the group has a history of employing social engineering tactics, spear-phishing, and watering hole attacks to

The North Korea-backed Lazarus Group has been observed targeting job seekers with malware capable of executing on Apple Macs with Intel and M1 chipsets. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET linked it to a campaign dubbed " Operation In(ter)ception " that was first disclosed in June 2020 and involved using social engineering tactics to trick employees working in the aerospace and military sectors into opening decoy job offer documents. The latest attack is no different in that a job description for the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange platform was used as a launchpad to drop a signed Mach-O executable. ESET's analysis comes from a sample of the binary that was uploaded to VirusTotal from Brazil on August 11, 2022. "Malware is compiled for both Intel and Apple Silicon," the company  said  in a series of tweets. "It drops three files: a decoy PDF document ' Coinbase_online_careers_2022_07.pdf ', a bundle  'FinderFontsUpdater.app ,' and a downloa

Lazarus Group, the advanced persistent threat (APT) group attributed to the North Korean government, has been observed waging two separate supply chain attack campaigns as a means to gain a foothold into corporate networks and target a wide range of downstream entities. The latest intelligence-gathering operation involved the use of MATA malware framework as well as backdoors dubbed  BLINDINGCAN  and  COPPERHEDGE  to attack the defense industry, an IT asset monitoring solution vendor based in Latvia, and a think tank located in South Korea, according to a new  Q3 2021 APT Trends report  published by Kaspersky. In one instance, the supply-chain attack originated from an infection chain that stemmed from legitimate South Korean security software running a malicious payload, leading to the deployment of the BLINDINGCAN and COPPERHEDGE malware on the think tank's network in June 2021. The other attack on the Latvian company in May is an "atypical victim" for Lazarus, the