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:

  • Hackers target Elasticsearch clusters in fresh malware campaign

    February 27, 2019

    Security researchers have observed a spike in attacks from multiple threat actors targeting Elasticsearch clusters, in what is believed to be an attempt to spread malware on victims’ machines. Attackers appear targeting clusters using versions 1.4.2 and lower, and are leveraging old vulnerabilities to pass scripts to search queries and drop the attacker’s payloads, according to ...

  • How to Attack and Defend a Prosthetic Arm

    February 26, 2019

    The IoT world has long since grown beyond the now-ubiquitous smartwatches, smartphones, smart coffee machines, cars capable of sending tweets and Facebook posts and other stuff like fridges that send spam. Today’s IoT world now boasts state-of-the-art solutions that quite literally help people. Take, for example, the biomechanical prosthetic arm made by Motorica Inc. This ...

  • Hackers abuse LinkedIn DMs to plant malware

    February 25, 2019

    Hackers are impersonating recruitment agencies on LinkedIn in a bid to target companies with backdoor malware. Researchers at Proofpoint found that the malware campaigns primarily targeted US companies in various industries including retail, entertainment, pharmacy, and others that commonly employ online payments, such as online shopping portals. In a blog post, the firm said hackers establish a relationship ...

  • 19-Year Old WinRAR RCE Vulnerability Gets Micropatch Which Keeps ACE Support

    February 22, 2019

    A micropatch was released to fix a 19-year old arbitrary code execution vulnerability impacting 500 million users of the WinRAR compression tool and to keep ACE support after the app’s devs removed it when they patched the security issue. Nadav Grossman from Check Point Software Technologies was the one who originally found the ACE Path Traversal logical bug in the UNACEV2.DLL library written by ...

  • DDoS Attacks Ranked As Highest Threat by Enterprises

    February 22, 2019

    US and EMEA security professionals interviewed by the Neustar International Security Council (NISC) in January 2019 said that DDoS attacks are perceived as the highest threat to their organizations, with roughly half of their companies having been attacked in 2018. Another 75% of all professionals who took part in NISC’s study said that they are deeply concerned about “bot ...

  • Spectre vulnerabilities cannot be mitigated by software alone

    February 19, 2019

    A team of Google researchers has demonstrated the Spectre vulnerabilities present in many of today’s processors cannot be completely mitigated by applying software fixes, as has been assumed. Variants of the Spectre flaw discovered last year, which involves information leaking via ‘speculative execution’ or functions performed early to speed up computation, are not just software glitches ...