Security News
Fast food giant McDonald's on Friday said hackers breached their servers and accessed data from customers in Taiwan and South Korea. The announcement by the iconic US chain about "Recent unauthorized activity on our network" comes amid a wave of cyberattacks worldwide targeting everything from meatpacking plants to pipelines to public utilities, some of whom have had to pay ransoms to hackers.
Microsoft and five other companies have received fines totaling US$75K from South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission, for running afoul of local data protection laws. The Commission fined Microsoft 16.4 million won for failing to have protective measures on administrative accounts that led to the leak of over 119,000 email accounts, 144 of which belonged to South Korean residents.
A North Korean threat actor active since 2012 has been behind a new espionage campaign targeting high-profile government officials associated with its southern counterpart to install an Android and Windows backdoor for collecting sensitive information. Cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes attributed the activity to a threat actor tracked as Kimsuky, with the targeted entities comprising of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador of the Embassy of Sri Lanka to the State, International Atomic Energy Agency Nuclear Security Officer, and the Deputy Consul General at Korean Consulate General in Hong Kong.
Nuclear-armed North Korea is advancing on the front lines of cyberwarfare, analysts say, stealing billions of dollars and presenting a clearer and more present danger than its banned weapons programmes. Pyongyang is under multiple international sanctions over its atomic bomb and ballistic missile programmes, which have seen rapid progress under North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But while the world's diplomatic focus has been on its nuclear ambitions, the North has been quietly and steadily building up its cyber capabilities, and analysts say its army of thousands of well-trained hackers are proving to be just as dangerous.
The Republic of Korea took two bold steps into the future on Tuesday, by announcing that the last of its 2G networks will go offline in June and that it will initiate large-scale adoption of communications protected by quantum encryption. The quantum tests will build on demos conducted in 2020, but this time South Korea's government hopes to involve multiple industries and to educate them on the benefits of the tech and how to adopt it.
State-sponsored hackers affiliated with North Korea have been behind a slew of attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges over the past three years, new evidence has revealed. Attributing the attack with "Medium-high" likelihood to the Lazarus Group, researchers from Israeli cybersecurity firm ClearSky said the campaign, dubbed "CryptoCore," targeted crypto exchanges in Israel, Japan, Europe, and the U.S., resulting in the theft of millions of dollars worth of virtual currencies.
South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Energy and Infrastructure has ordered a review of the cybersecurity preparedness of the nation's energy infrastructure. Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Moon Seung-wook convened a meeting yesterday, saying it was needed considering the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline that shuttered one of the USA's main oil transport facilities.
Excellent New Yorker article on North Korea’s offensive cyber capabilities.
North Korean hackers tried to break into the computer systems of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in a search for information on a coronavirus vaccine and treatment technology, South Korea's spy agency said Tuesday, according to reports. The impoverished, nuclear-armed North has been under self-imposed isolation since closing its borders in January last year to try to protect itself from the virus that first emerged in neighbouring China and has gone on to sweep the world, killing more than two million people.
North Korea has modernized its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles by flaunting United Nations sanctions, using cyberattacks to help finance its programs and continuing to seek material and technology overseas for its arsenal, U.N. experts said. The panel recommended that the Security Council impose sanctions on four North Korean men: Choe Song Chol, Im Song Sun, Pak Hwa Song, and Hwang Kil Su. The Security Council has imposed increasingly tough sanctions on North Korea since its first test explosion of a nuclear device in 2006.