North Korea Aggressively Targeting Crypto Industry with Well-Disguised Social Engineering Attacks


The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (“DPRK” aka North Korea) is conducting highly tailored, difficult-to-detect social engineering campaigns against employees of decentralized finance (“DeFi”), cryptocurrency, and similar businesses to deploy malware and steal company cryptocurrency.

North Korean social engineering schemes are complex and elaborate, often compromising victims with sophisticated technical acumen. Given the scale and persistence of this malicious activity, even those well versed in cybersecurity practices can be vulnerable to North Korea’s determination to compromise networks connected to cryptocurrency assets. North Korean malicious cyber actors conducted research on a variety of targets connected to cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds (ETFs) over the last several months.

Read more…
Source: U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Cyber Division


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Botnet malware disguises itself as password cracker for industrial controllers

    July 18, 2022

    Industrial engineers and operators are being lured into running backdoor malware disguised as tools for recovering access to work systems. These programs offer to crack passwords for specific programmable logic controllers, according to security shop Dragos this month. According to their online ads, the cracking tools can help unlock products from more than a dozen electronics manufacturing ...

  • Hackers pose as journalists to breach news media org’s networks

    July 16, 2022

    Researchers following the activities of advanced persistent (APT) threat groups originating from China, North Korea, Iran, and Turkey say that journalists and media organizations have remained a constant target for state-aligned actors. The adversaries are either masquerading or attacking these targets because they have unique access to non-public information that could help expand a cyberespionage operation. Recent ...

  • Meet Mantis – the tiny shrimp that launched 3,000 DDoS attacks

    July 15, 2022

    The botnet behind the largest-ever HTTPS-based distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has been named after a tiny shrimp. Cloudflare said it thwarted the 26 million request per second (rps) attack last month, and we’re told the biz has been tracking the botnet ever since. Now, the internet infrastructure company has given the botnet a name — Mantis — ...

  • Attackers scan 1.6 million WordPress sites for vulnerable plugin

    July 15, 2022

    Security researchers have detected a massive campaign that scanned close to 1.6 million WordPress sites for the presence of a vulnerable plugin that allows uploading files without authentication. The attackers are targeting the Kaswara Modern WPBakery Page Builder, which has been abandoned by its author before receiving a patch for a critical severity flaw tracked as ...

  • The industrial internet of things is still a big mess when it comes to security

    July 14, 2022

    Critical infrastructure is increasingly targeted by cyber criminals – and while those responsible for running industrial networks know that securing operational technology (OT) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is vital, they’re struggling, resulting in networks being left vulnerable to attacks. According to analysis by cybersecurity company Barracuda, 94% of industrial organisations have experienced a ...

  • Cyber Safety Review Board Releases Unprecedented Report of its Review into Log4j Vulnerabilities and Response

    July 14, 2022

    WASHINGTON – Today, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released the Cyber Safety Review Board’s (CSRB) first report, which includes 19 actionable recommendations for government and industry. The recommendations from the CSRB – an unprecedented public-private initiative that brings together government and industry leaders to review and assess significant cybersecurity events to better protect ...