Security News > 2023 > September > North Korean Hackers Exploit Zero-Day Bug to Target Cybersecurity Researchers

Threat actors associated with North Korea are continuing to target the cybersecurity community using a zero-day bug in unspecified software over the past several weeks to infiltrate their machines.

A search on X shows that the now-suspended account has been active since at least October 2022, with the actor releasing proof-of-concept exploit code for high-severity privilege escalation flaws in the Windows Kernel such as CVE-2021-34514 and CVE-2022-21881.

This is not the first time North Korean actors have leveraged collaboration-themed lures to infect victims.

"After establishing contact with a target, the threat actor invites the target to collaborate on a GitHub repository and convinces the target to clone and execute its contents," the Microsoft-owned company said at the time.

The disclosure comes as the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center revealed that North Korean nation-state actor known as ScarCruft is leveraging LNK file lures in phishing emails to deliver a backdoor capable of harvesting sensitive data and executing malicious instructions.

"North Korean cyber threat actors pursue cyber operations aiming to collect intelligence on the activities of the state's perceived adversaries: South Korea, the United States, and Japan, collect intelligence on other countries' military capabilities to improve their own, and collect cryptocurrency funds for the state," Microsoft said.

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https://thehackernews.com/2023/09/north-korean-hackers-exploit-zero-day.html