“You are mistaken if you think they have moral qualms about attacking someone else’s network,” said Jang Se-iul, a graduate of Mirim College and an officer in the North Korean military before he left for South Korea in 2008. overflowed. interview. “For them, cyberspace is a battlefield and they are fighting enemies who are hurting their country.”
Mr Jang said North Korea first started building its electronic warfare for defensive purposes, but soon realized it could be an effective offensive weapon against its digital enemies.
Around the time that Mr. Jang arrived in Seoul, websites in South Korea and the United States came under attack from a spate of cyber attacks. With names like Lazarus, Kimsuky and BeagleBoyz, North Korean hackers used increasingly sophisticated tools to infiltrate networks of military, government, corporate and defense industries around the world to conduct cyber espionage and steal sensitive data in order to support weapons development.
“Make no mistake, the DPRK hackers are really good,” Eric Penton-Voak, a coordinator with the UN panel of experts, said during a webinar in April, using the acronym of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “They’re looking at really interesting and very gray new areas of cryptocurrency because A, nobody really understands them, and B, they can exploit weakness.”
According to Chainaysis, North Korean hackers typically break foreign crypto wallets through phishing attacks, luring victims with fake LinkedIn recruiting pages or other bait. The hackers then use a complex array of financial instruments to transfer the stolen funds, with the loot being moved through cryptocurrency “mixers” that combine multiple streams of digital assets, making it more difficult to track the movement of any given batch of cryptocurrency. .
“They are very methodical in how they launder them,” said Erin Plante, senior research director of Chainalysis. “They are very methodical in small amounts moving over long periods of time to eventually try to evade researchers.”