Entries Tagged "North Korea"

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North Korea Hacking Cryptocurrency Sites with 3CX Exploit

News:

Researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky today revealed that they identified a small number of cryptocurrency-focused firms as at least some of the victims of the 3CX software supply-chain attack that’s unfolded over the past week. Kaspersky declined to name any of those victim companies, but it notes that they’re based in “western Asia.”

Security firms CrowdStrike and SentinelOne last week pinned the operation on North Korean hackers, who compromised 3CX installer software that’s used by 600,000 organizations worldwide, according to the vendor. Despite the potentially massive breadth of that attack, which SentinelOne dubbed “Smooth Operator,” Kaspersky has now found that the hackers combed through the victims infected with its corrupted software to ultimately target fewer than 10 machines­—at least as far as Kaspersky could observe so far—­and that they seemed to be focusing on cryptocurrency firms with “surgical precision.”

Posted on April 4, 2023 at 10:10 AM • View Comments

FBI Seizes Stolen Cryptocurrencies

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the FBI has recovered over $30 million in cryptocurrency stolen by North Korean hackers earlier this year. It’s only a fraction of the $540 million stolen, but it’s something.

The Axie Infinity recovery represents a shift in law enforcement’s ability to trace funds through a web of so-called crypto addresses, the virtual accounts where cryptocurrencies are stored. These addresses can be created quickly without them being linked to a cryptocurrency company that could freeze the funds.

In its effort to mask the stolen crypto, Lazarus Group used more than 12,000 different addresses, according to Chainalysis. Unlike bank transactions that happen through private networks, movement between crypto accounts is visible to the world on the blockchain.

Advanced blockchain-monitoring tools and cooperation from centralized crypto exchanges enabled the FBI to trace the crypto to where Lazarus Group tried to cash out, investigators said.

The money was laundered through the Tornado Cash mixer.

Posted on September 13, 2022 at 6:51 AM • View Comments

Chrome Zero-Day from North Korea

North Korean hackers have been exploiting a zero-day in Chrome.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-0609, was exploited by two separate North Korean hacking groups. Both groups deployed the same exploit kit on websites that either belonged to legitimate organizations and were hacked or were set up for the express purpose of serving attack code on unsuspecting visitors. One group was dubbed Operation Dream Job, and it targeted more than 250 people working for 10 different companies. The other group, known as AppleJeus, targeted 85 users.

Details:

The attackers made use of an exploit kit that contained multiple stages and components in order to exploit targeted users. The attackers placed links to the exploit kit within hidden iframes, which they embedded on both websites they owned as well as some websites they compromised.

The kit initially serves some heavily obfuscated javascript used to fingerprint the target system. This script collected all available client information such as the user-agent, resolution, etc. and then sent it back to the exploitation server. If a set of unknown requirements were met, the client would be served a Chrome RCE exploit and some additional javascript. If the RCE was successful, the javascript would request the next stage referenced within the script as “SBX”, a common acronym for Sandbox Escape. We unfortunately were unable to recover any of the stages that followed the initial RCE.

Careful to protect their exploits, the attackers deployed multiple safeguards to make it difficult for security teams to recover any of the stages. These safeguards included:

  • Only serving the iframe at specific times, presumably when they knew an intended target would be visiting the site.
  • On some email campaigns the targets received links with unique IDs. This was potentially used to enforce a one-time-click policy for each link and allow the exploit kit to only be served once.
  • The exploit kit would AES encrypt each stage, including the clients’ responses with a session-specific key.
  • Additional stages were not served if the previous stage failed.

Although we recovered a Chrome RCE, we also found evidence where the attackers specifically checked for visitors using Safari on MacOS or Firefox (on any OS), and directed them to specific links on known exploitation servers. We did not recover any responses from those URLs.

If you’re a Chrome user, patch your system now.

Posted on March 31, 2022 at 6:13 AM • View Comments

North Korea ATM Hack

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a long and technical alert describing a North Korea hacking scheme against ATMs in a bunch of countries worldwide:

This joint advisory is the result of analytic efforts among the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of the Treasury (Treasury), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM). Working with U.S. government partners, CISA, Treasury, FBI, and USCYBERCOM identified malware and indicators of compromise (IOCs) used by the North Korean government in an automated teller machine (ATM) cash-out scheme­—referred to by the U.S. Government as “FASTCash 2.0: North Korea’s BeagleBoyz Robbing Banks.”

The level of detail is impressive, as seems to be common in CISA’s alerts and analysis reports.

Posted on September 1, 2020 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

US Government Exposes North Korean Malware

US Cyber Command has uploaded North Korean malware samples to the VirusTotal aggregation repository, adding to the malware samples it uploaded in February.

The first of the new malware variants, COPPERHEDGE, is described as a Remote Access Tool (RAT) “used by advanced persistent threat (APT) cyber actors in the targeting of cryptocurrency exchanges and related entities.”

This RAT is known for its capability to help the threat actors perform system reconnaissance, run arbitrary commands on compromised systems, and exfiltrate stolen data.

TAINTEDSCRIBE is a trojan that acts as a full-featured beaconing implant with command modules and designed to disguise as Microsoft’s Narrator.

The trojan “downloads its command execution module from a command and control (C2) server and then has the capability to download, upload, delete, and execute files; enable Windows CLI access; create and terminate processes; and perform target system enumeration.”

Last but not least, PEBBLEDASH is yet another North Korean trojan acting like a full-featured beaconing implant and used by North Korean-backed hacking groups “to download, upload, delete, and execute files; enable Windows CLI access; create and terminate processes; and perform target system enumeration.”

It’s interesting to see the US government take a more aggressive stance on foreign malware. Making samples public, so all the antivirus companies can add them to their scanning systems, is a big deal—and probably required some complicated declassification maneuvering.

Me, I like reading the codenames.

Lots more on the US-CERT website.

Posted on May 14, 2020 at 6:29 AM • View Comments

Russians Hacked the Olympics

Two weeks ago, I blogged about the myriad of hacking threats against the Olympics. Last week, the Washington Post reported that Russia hacked the Olympics network and tried to cast the blame on North Korea.

Of course, the evidence is classified, so there’s no way to verify this claim. And while the article speculates that the hacks were a retaliation for Russia being banned due to doping, that doesn’t ring true to me. If they tried to blame North Korea, it’s more likely that they’re trying to disrupt something between North Korea, South Korea, and the US. But I don’t know.

Posted on March 1, 2018 at 6:47 AM • View Comments

Internet Security Threats at the Olympics

There are a lot:

The cybersecurity company McAfee recently uncovered a cyber operation, dubbed Operation GoldDragon, attacking South Korean organizations related to the Winter Olympics. McAfee believes the attack came from a nation state that speaks Korean, although it has no definitive proof that this is a North Korean operation. The victim organizations include ice hockey teams, ski suppliers, ski resorts, tourist organizations in Pyeongchang, and departments organizing the Pyeongchang Olympics.

Meanwhile, a Russia-linked cyber attack has already stolen and leaked documents from other Olympic organizations. The so-called Fancy Bear group, or APT28, began its operations in late 2017—­ according to Trend Micro and Threat Connect, two private cybersecurity firms­—eventually publishing documents in 2018 outlining the political tensions between IOC officials and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) officials who are policing Olympic athletes. It also released documents specifying exceptions to anti-doping regulations granted to specific athletes (for instance, one athlete was given an exception because of his asthma medication). The most recent Fancy Bear leak exposed details about a Canadian pole vaulter’s positive results for cocaine. This group has targeted WADA in the past, specifically during the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Assuming the attribution is right, the action appears to be Russian retaliation for the punitive steps against Russia.

A senior analyst at McAfee warned that the Olympics may experience more cyber attacks before closing ceremonies. A researcher at ThreatConnect asserted that organizations like Fancy Bear have no reason to stop operations just because they’ve already stolen and released documents. Even the United States Department of Homeland Security has issued a notice to those traveling to South Korea to remind them to protect themselves against cyber risks.

One presumes the Olympics network is sufficiently protected against the more pedestrian DDoS attacks and the like, but who knows?

EDITED TO ADD: There was already one attack.

Posted on February 12, 2018 at 6:36 AM • View Comments

NSA Links WannaCry to North Korea

There’s evidence:

Though the assessment is not conclusive, the preponderance of the evidence points to Pyongyang. It includes the range of computer Internet protocol addresses in China historically used by the RGB, and the assessment is consistent with intelligence gathered recently by other Western spy agencies. It states that the hackers behind WannaCry are also called “the Lazarus Group,” a name used by private-sector researchers.

One of the agencies reported that a prototype of WannaCry ransomware was found this spring in a non-Western bank. That data point was a “building block” for the North Korea assessment, the individual said.

Honestly, I don’t know what to think. I am skeptical, but I am willing to be convinced. (Here’s the grugq, also trying to figure it out.) What I would like to see is the NSA evidence in more detail than they’re probably comfortable releasing.

More commentary. Slashdot thread.

Posted on June 16, 2017 at 2:11 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.