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
Related:
- Dissected: A dropper-as-a-service miscreants pay to push their malware onto potentially 1,000s of victims
September 2, 2021
A dropper-as-a-service, which cyber-crime newbies can use to easily get their malware onto thousands of victims’ PCs, has been dissected and documented this week. A dropper is a program that, when run, executes a payload of malicious code. The dropper is similar to a trojan, and it can sometimes have other functionality, but its main purpose ...
- Scam artists are recruiting English speakers for business email campaigns
September 1, 2021
Native English speakers are being recruited in their droves by criminals trying to make Business Email Compromise (BEC) more effective. BEC schemes can be simple to execute and among the most potentially devastating for a business, alongside threats such as ransomware. A BEC scam will usually start with a phishing email, tailored and customized depending on the ...
- Google Play Sign-Ins Allow Covert Location-Tracking
September 1, 2021
It’s possible to track someone’s user location via Google Play sign-ins, a researcher has discovered – a potential stalker avenue that, so far, the internet behemoth has yet to address. “With the aid of Google I was able to ‘spy’ on my wife’s whereabouts without having to install anything on her phone,” said Malwarebytes Labs researcher ...
- Ransomware Awareness for Holidays and Weekends
August 31, 2021
CISA and the FBI have released an advisory warning of potential cyberattacks that may occur over the coming Labor Day weekend, noting that in recent years hackers have launched dozens of devastating attacks on long weekends. They urged organizations to take steps to secure their systems, reduce their exposure and potentially “engage in preemptive threat hunting ...
- Cyberattackers are now quietly selling off their victim’s internet bandwidth
August 31, 2021
Cyberattackers are now targeting their victim’s internet connection to quietly generate illicit revenue following a malware infection. On Tuesday, researchers from Cisco Talos said “proxyware” is becoming noticed in the cybercrime ecosystem and, as a result, is being twisted for illegal purposes. Proxyware, also known as internet-sharing applications, are legitimate services that allow users to portion out ...
- LockFile Ransomware Uses Never-Before Seen Encryption to Avoid Detection
August 31, 2021
Researchers discovered a novel ransomware emerging on the heels of the ProxyShell vulnerabilities discovery in Microsoft Exchange servers. The threat, dubbed LockFile, uses a unique “intermittent encryption” method as a way to evade detection as well as adopting tactics from previous ransomware gangs. Discovered by researchers at Sophos, LockFile ransomware encrypts every 16 bytes of a ...

