Security News > 2021 > November > Lazarus hackers target researchers with trojanized IDA Pro
A North Korean state-sponsored hacking group known as Lazarus is again trying to hack security researchers, this time with a trojanized pirated version of the popular IDA Pro reverse engineering application.
IDA Pro is an application that converts an executable into assembly language, allowing security researchers and programmers to analyze how a program works and discover potential bugs.
As IDA Pro is an expensive application, some researchers download a pirated cracked version instead of purchasing it.
As with any pirated software, there is always the risk of it being tampered modified to include malicious executables, which is precisely what ESET researcher Anton Cherepanov discovered in a pirated version of IDA Pro distributed by the Lazarus hacking group.
Today, ESET tweeted about a malicious version of IDA Pro 7.5 discovered by Cherepanov that is being distributed online to target security researchers.
The Lazarus hacking group, also known as Zinc by Microsoft, has a long history of targeting security researchers with backdoors and remote access trojans.