Security News

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.

Hackers linked to North Korea are targeting security researchers with an elaborate social-engineering campaign that sets up trusted relationships with them - and then infects their organizations' systems with custom backdoor malware. The effort includes attackers going so far as to set up their own research blog, multiple Twitter profiles and other social-media accounts in order to look like legitimate security researchers themselves, according to a blog post by TAG's Adam Weidermann.

North Korea's hackers homed in on specific infosec researchers and infected their systems with a backdoor after luring them to a suspicious website, Google revealed on Monday. "The researchers have followed a link on Twitter to a write-up hosted on blog.br0vvnn[.]io, and shortly thereafter, a malicious service was installed on the researcher's system and an in-memory backdoor would begin beaconing to an actor-owned command and control server," said Googler Adam Weidemann.

A North Korean hacking group has been found deploying the RokRat Trojan in a new spear-phishing campaign targeting the South Korean government. Attributing the attack to APT37, Malwarebytes said it identified a malicious document last December that, when opened, executes a macro in memory to install the aforementioned remote access tool.

In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development - he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley - he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could double every year.

Netskope announced the expansion of the Netskope NewEdge network with a new data center in Seoul, South Korea. Serving millions of enterprise users around the world, Netskope NewEdge is a carrier-grade, security private cloud network that is reserved exclusively for Netskope customers.

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Lazarus has been targeting users in South Korea through a supply chain attack that involves software typically required by government and financial organizations, ESET reported on Monday. Lazarus is the most well known hacker group that is believed to be operating on behalf of the North Korean government, with attacks ranging from espionage to profit-driven operations.