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:

  • San Diego: Scripps Health Cyberattack Causes Widespread Hospital Outages

    May 3, 2021

    Scripps Health, a hospital network based in San Diego, was hit by a cyberattack over the weekend, forcing some critical-care patients to be diverted, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Scripps acknowledged the attack in a statement but didn’t specify whether it was a ransomware incident. It’s also unknown whether the adversaries compromised any patient records ...

  • New Buer Malware Downloader Rewritten in E-Z Rust Language

    May 3, 2021

    A variant of the Buer malware, which is being distributed in emails disguised as DHL support shipping notices, comes with a fresh code rewrite in the popular Rust language and looks like it may be in the process of prepping for rental to other cybercrooks. Using the increasingly popular, efficient and easy-to-use Rust programming language will ...

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise Plugs Critical Bug in Edge Platform Tool

    May 3, 2021

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is urging customers to patch one of its premier edge application management tools that could allow an attacker to carry out a remote authentication bypass attack and infiltrate a customer’s cloud infrastructure. Rated critical, with a CVSS score of 9.8, the bug impacts all versions of HPE’s Edgeline Infrastructure Manager (EIM) prior ...

  • Suspected Chinese state hackers target Russian submarine designer

    April 30, 2021

    Hackers suspected to work for the Chinese government have used a new malware called PortDoor to infiltrate the systems of an engineering company that designs submarines for the Russian Navy. They used a spear-phishing email specifically crafted to lure the general director of the company into opening a malicious document. The threat actor targeted Rubin Central Design ...

  • Microsoft finds memory allocation holes in range of IoT and industrial technology

    April 30, 2021

    The security research group for Azure Defender for IoT, dubbed Section 52, has found a batch of bad memory allocation operations in code used in Internet of Things and operational technology (OT) such as industrial control systems that could lead to malicious code execution. Given the trendy vulnerability name of BadAlloc, the vulnerabilities are related to ...

  • Babuk quits ransomware encryption, focuses on data-theft extortion

    April 30, 2021

    A new message today from the operators of Babuk ransomware clarifies that the gang has decided to close the affiliate program and move to an extortion model that does not rely on encrypting victim computers. The explanation comes after yesterday the group posted and deleted two announcements about their plan to close the project and release ...