CYBERWAR/INTELLIGENCE/NORTH KOREA/TURKEY: “Suspected North Korean hackers blitzed Turkish financial institutions and a government organization last week, seeking intelligence for a future heist, a new report says.
The attacks on March 2 and 3, identified by cyber researcher McAfee LLC in a Thursday [3-8-18] report, attempted to lure targets with faux links to a popular cryptocurrency platform, allowing hackers to plunder sensitive information about the breached computer networks. The report doesn’t identify the entities struck. No money was taken…
As economic sanctions against North Korea have tightened over the past year, more of its cyberattacks have pursued financial gains, according to cybersecurity experts. North Korea has been suspected in digital raids of South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges last year. And recent targets have ranged from global banks to ATMs…
McAfee policy is to not officially identify nation-state cyber units as culprits. But its Thursday report said the malware code closely resembles code used in attacks by a North Korea-linked hacking operative—called Lazarus by many cyber researchers—that was blamed for last year’s WannaCry ransomware attack and the 2014 Sony Pictures hack.
Last week’s attacks, which McAfee calls the ‘Bankshot’ implant—the malware is implanted in a file that infects computers—compromised a number of computers in Turkey, McAfee said, and some early indications also suggest more financial organizations across Europe were infected.”
-Timothy W. Martin, “North Korea Suspected in Cyberattack on Turkey,” The Wall Street Journal online, Mar. 8, 2018 09:02am