Security News

North Korean threat actors are once again attempting to compromise security researchers' machines by employing a zero-day exploit. The warning comes from Google's own security researchers Clement Lecigne and Maddie Stone, who detailed the latest campaign mounted by government-backed attackers.

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.

Microsoft says North Korean hacking groups have breached multiple Russian government and defense targets since the start of the year. "Multiple North Korean threat actors have recently targeted the Russian government and defense industry - likely for intelligence collection - while simultaneously providing material support for Russia in its war on Ukraine," said Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft's Digital Threat Analysis Center.

North Korean state-sponsored hackers are behind the VMConnect campaign that uploaded to the PyPI repository malicious packages, one of them mimicking the VMware vSphere connector module vConnector. A report today from ReversingLabs, a software supply chain security company, attributes the campaign to Labyrinth Chollima, a subgroup of North Korean Lazarus hackers.

Three additional rogue Python packages have been discovered in the Package Index repository as part of an ongoing malicious software supply chain campaign called VMConnect, with signs pointing to the involvement of North Korean state-sponsored threat actors. First disclosed at the start of the month by the company and Sonatype, VMConnect refers to a collection of Python packages that mimic popular open-source Python tools to download an unknown second-stage malware.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday warned that threat actors affiliated with North Korea may attempt to cash out stolen cryptocurrency worth more than $40 million. North Korea is known to blur the lines among cyber warfare, espionage, and financial crime.

The npm package registry has emerged as the target of yet another highly targeted attack campaign that aims to entice developers into downloading malevolent modules. Software supply chain security firm Phylum told The Hacker News the activity exhibits similar behaviors to that of a previous attack wave uncovered in June, which has since been linked to North Korean threat actors.

North Korean state-sponsored hackers have breached Russian missile maker NPO Mashinostroyeniya, according to SentinelLabs researchers. The researchers came across leaked email communication between NPO Mashinostroyeniya's IT staff that contained information about a possible cyber intrusion first detected in May 2022.

Two North Korean hacker groups had access to the internal systems of Russian missile and satellite developer NPO Mashinostoyeniya for five to six months, cyber security firm SentinelOne asserted on Monday. The attack illustrates potential North Korean efforts to advance development of missile and other military tech via cyber espionage.

The North Korean state-sponsored hacking group ScarCruft has been linked to a cyberattack on the IT infrastructure and email server for NPO Mashinostroyeniya, a Russian space rocket designer and intercontinental ballistic missile engineering organization. Today, SentinelLabs reported that ScarCruft is behind a hack of NPO Mashinostroyeniya's email server and IT systems, where the threat actors planted a Windows backdoor named 'OpenCarrot' for remote access to the network.