Tag Archive for: spree

Who died in killing spree? Spoilers

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Canadian admits to hacking spree with Russian cyber-gang

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The leaders, who are still at large, communicate in Russian online and ensure that their malware does not infect Russian computer systems, or those of former Soviet countries whic …

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“The Lazarus Heist” explains North Korea’s wild hacking spree

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The Lazarus Heist. By Geoff White. Penguin Business; 304 pages; $29.95 and £20

The “hermit kingdom” of North Korea is so technologically backward that it is visible—or rather invisible—from space. Photographs taken at night show a country covered in darkness, with only a few pinpricks of light around Pyongyang, the capital. China, Japan and South Korea, by contrast, glow with artificial illumination.

But as Geoff White, a bbc journalist, explains in his rollicking new book, that backwardness has helped make a handful of North Koreans very technologically savvy indeed. He tells the story of the Lazarus Group, the name given by security analysts to a collection of North Korean state-sponsored hackers. In a country where access to the internet is a luxury afforded to only a tiny few, they have, over the past decade, become some of the world’s most prolific cybercriminals.

The Lazarus Group is thought to have been responsible for a $100m raid on Bangladesh’s central bank in 2016; the WannaCry malware attack that in 2017 hit organisations around the world, from Maersk, a shipping giant, to Britain’s National Health Service; and a string of more recent hacks and cryptocurrency frauds. The group’s various schemes are thought to have netted billions of dollars of precious foreign currency for the North Korean regime.

“The Lazarus Heist”, which is based on a bbc podcast of the same name, provides both a pacey insight into the cutting edge of modern crime and an equally fascinating portrait of life inside North Korea (gleaned from a mix of official sources and interviews with defectors). In theory, the regime preaches Juche, usually translated as “self-reliance”, deliberately isolating itself from the decadent capitalism that contaminates the rest of the world.

But self-imposed isolation has left North Korea impoverished and underdeveloped. Its pursuit of nuclear weapons has brought sanctions, compounding the problem. With the economy strangled and citizens poor and sometimes starving, Mr White describes a state trying its hand at a variety of criminal schemes, from counterfeiting to smuggling and cooking crystal meth, in an effort to earn foreign currency. Eventually it…

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A Hacking Spree Against Iran Spills Out Into the Physical World

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In April 2020 hackers infiltrated the systems of an Israeli water-pumping station and tampered with equipment. Individual pumps started malfunctioning as officials scrambled to keep water supplies flowing for millions of people. After the incident, which has been linked to Iran, officials said the damage could have been much worse: They suspect the attack was intended to poison water supplies by increasing chlorine levels. Weeks later, hackers targeted an Iranian port in an apparent act of retaliation.

“This was the first time that a nation responded immediately through the cyber medium for a cyberattack,” says Lotem Finkelstein, director of threat intelligence and research at Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point. The attacks, he says, marked the start of a new wave of hacking against infrastructure in the region, which has disrupted millions of lives.

In the past several months, those strikes have escalated. Fuel supply systems, railway controls, and an airline in Iran have all faced attacks. At the same time, hackers have posted the personal information of a million Israeli LGBTQ dating app users, and exposed certain details about the Israeli army. The skirmishes—which have included physical sabotage and the destruction of facilities—are the latest moves in the decades-long hostilities between Iran and Israel. They’re now spilling further into shadowy acts of digital espionage and disruption.

The attacks worry experts, who say the infrastructure that underpins large parts of daily life should be off-limits for state-sponsored hackers. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has set out 16 crucial sectors—including energy, health care, dams, and food—that it believes should be out of the scope of state-sponsored hackers. The attacks also come as Iran restarts nuclear weapons negotiations with world superpowers.

“It seems that this is a case of different actors trying to demonstrate their capabilities in order to basically establish a new kind of balance of power in the region,” says Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank, who adds there has been greater diplomacy between countries in…

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