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:

  • CISA says 62,000 QNAP NAS devices have been infected with the QSnatch malware

    July 27, 2020

    Cyber-security agencies from the UK and the US have published today a joint security alert about QSnatch, a strain of malware that has been infecting network-attached storage (NAS) devices from Taiwanese device maker QNAP. In alerts by the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), ...

  • Garmin obtains decryption key after ransomware attack

    July 27, 2020

    Smartwatch maker Garmin has obtained the decryption key to recover its computer files from a ransomware attack last Thursday, Sky News has learned. Last week, Garmin’s services were taken offline after hackers infected the company’s networks with a ransomware virus known as WastedLocker. A number of the company’s services are operational again and the business has now ...

  • Kubernetes Vulnerability Puts Clusters at Risk of Takeover (CVE-2020-8558)

    July 27, 2020

    A security issue assigned CVE-2020-8558 was recently discovered in the kube-proxy, a networking component running on Kubernetes nodes. The issue exposed internal services of Kubernetes nodes, often run without authentication. On certain Kubernetes deployments, this could have exposed the api-server, allowing an unauthenticated attacker to gain complete control over the cluster. An attacker with this ...

  • Ensiko: A Webshell With Ransomware Capabilities

    July 27, 2020

    Ensiko is a PHP web shell with ransomware capabilities that targets various platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, or any other platform that has PHP installed. The malware has the capability to remotely control the system and accept commands to perform malicious activities on the infected machine. It can also execute shell commands on an infected ...

  • NSA Urgently Warns on Industrial Cyberattacks, Triconex Critical Bug

    July 24, 2020

    The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued an alert warning that adversaries could be targeting critical infrastructure across the U.S. Separately, ICS-CERT issued an advisory on a critical security bug in the Schneider Electric Triconex TriStation and Tricon Communication Module. These safety instrumented system (SIS) controllers are ...

  • OilRig Targets Middle Eastern Telecom Organization and Adds Novel C2 Channel with Steganography to Its Inventory

    July 22, 2020

    While analyzing an attack against a Middle Eastern telecommunications organization, Unit 42 has discovered a variant of an OilRig-associated tool we call RDAT using a novel email-based command and control (C2) channel that relied on a technique known as steganography to hide commands and data within bitmap images attached to emails. In May 2020, Symantec published ...