A Lot Of North Koreans do not spend much of their lives in front of a computer. But a few of the fortunate few who do, it appears, have been hit with an impressive toolbox of hacking methods over the in 2015– a sophisticated spying spree that some researchers believe South Korea may have pulled off.
Cybersecurity scientists at Google’s Danger Analysis Group today exposed that an unnamed group of hackers utilized no less than five zero-day vulnerabilities, secret hackable flaws in software, to target North Koreans and North Korea-focused professionals in2019 The hacking operations exploited defects in Web Explorer, Chrome, and Windows with phishing emails that brought harmful attachments or links to malicious sites, along with so-called watering hole attacks that planted malware on victims’ devices when they checked out particular websites that had actually been hacked to contaminate visitors via their web browsers.
Google declined to talk about who may be accountable for the attacks, but Russian security company Kaspersky tells WIRED it has actually linked Google’s findings with DarkHotel, a group that has actually targeted North Koreans in the past and is presumed of dealing with behalf southern Korean government.
South Koreans spying on a northern foe that often threatens to release rockets throughout the border is not unexpected. But the country’s capability to use five absolutely no days in a single spy project within a year represents a surprising level of elegance and resources. “Discovering this many zero-day exploits from the very same star in a relatively brief time frame is rare,” writes Google TAG scientist Toni Gidwani in the company’s article “The majority of targets we observed were from North Korea or people who dealt with North Korea-related iss