Security News

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cybersecurity researchers took the wraps off a novel supply chain attack in South Korea that abuses legitimate security software and stolen digital certificates to distribute remote administration tools on target systems. Attributing the operation to the Lazarus Group, also known as Hidden Cobra, Slovak internet security company ESET said the state-sponsored threat actor leveraged the mandatory requirement that internet users in the country must install additional security software in order to avail Internet banking and essential government services.

A threat actor linked to South Korea has launched attacks against Chinese government agencies using a zero-day vulnerability affecting a local VPN service, Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 reported on Monday. Qihoo 360 does not directly accuse South Korea of being behind the attacks, but says the threat actor is located in the Korean Peninsula and notes that its victims include North Korea.