North Korea Has Tried To Hack 11 Officials of the UN Security Council (zdnet.com) 9
A hacker group previously associated with the North Korean regime has been spotted launching spear-phishing attacks to compromise officials part of the United Nations Security Council. From a report: The attacks, disclosed in a UN report last month, have taken place this year and have targeted at least 28 UN officials, including at least 11 individuals representing six countries on the UN Security Council. UN officials said they learned of the attacks after being alerted by an unnamed UN member state (country). The attacks were attributed to a North Korean hacker group known in the cyber-security community by the codename of Kimsuky. According to the UN report, Kimsuky operations took place across March and April this year and consisted of a series of spear-phishing campaigns aimed at the Gmail accounts of UN officials. The emails were designed to look like UN security alerts or requests for interviews from reporters, both designed to convince officials to access phishing pages or run malware files on their systems.
Rank? (Score:4, Insightful)
Compared to other countries where does this rank? I'm guessing not in the top 10.
Much higher than other forms of power (Score:4, Informative)
North Korea's ranking depends on what exactly you are ranking, of course - cyber offensive capability, damage done to other countries, etc.
For reference, North Korea's economic power ranks about #117 - the country is largely inconsequential in many respects, which is why they want to have nukes and why they are so noisy - so that they will matter.
On cyber, they rank anywhere from #4 to #15 depending on what exactly you are ranking and how. That's much higher than their #117 economy. North Korea is the only country that has an official government department whose function is to steal from people in other countries over the internet.
More from Fireye, in an article for laypersons:
https://www.zdnet.com/google-a... [zdnet.com]
Hacking (Score:1)
At least that was computer type of hacking and not the axe type hacking
Sorry, -what- was the codename? (Score:5, Funny)
The attacks were attributed to a North Korean hacker group known in the cyber-security community by the codename of Kimsuky.
One better hope word doesn't get back to the Supreme Leader how westerns may read and interpret that group's name.
Re: (Score:1)
What's missing from this thread? (Score:4, Funny)
Where are all of the cyber-forensic skeptics claiming that we have no way of know who has been trying to hack the UN?
I'll give it a shot: They were behind seven proxies when they sent the phishing email! Maybe it is a false flag to make the Norks look bad! Maybe the country who alerted the others is the actual bad actor!1!!1!
I bet that if Kim had made a beautiful deal with the US, he would have more defenders here. Sad.
Re: (Score:1)
yeah there are like so many north korean tor exit nodes that it's impossible to tell who's behind them
North Korean Computing Power (Score:1)
luckily their rube-goldberg plywood-and-string mechanical computers didn't have enough processing power to successfully hack the UN