[ad_1]
The Justice Ministry on Thursday accused an alleged computer hacker of the North Korean government over a series of cyber attacks, including the assault on Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014, marking the first US indictment against an operator from Pyongyang.
Park Jin Hyok is accused of involvement in a plot to hack on behalf of the North Korean General Reconnaissance Bureau (RGB), the military intelligence agency that controls most of the country's computer capabilities.
[Read the criminal complaint]
He and other unidentified pirates are accused of being members of the Lazarus group, who was also involved in the bold attempt to steal $ 1 billion from the Bangladesh bank in 2016 and the WannaCry virus. 2.0 which has reached more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries. last year.
The charges against Park and his co-conspirators, detailed in a 179-page complaint, come as President Trump seeks North Korea's commitment to completely abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Pyongyang denied the allegations of piracy.
"The magnitude and scope of the cyber-crimes alleged by the complaint are staggering and offensive to all those who respect the rule of law and Internet standards accepted by the responsible countries," said the Deputy Attorney General John Demers.
The Treasury Department also imposed sanctions Thursday on Park and the joint venture Chosun Expo, a state-owned company that used it in Dalian, China. The authorities said Park and others were exploiting not only North Korea but also China and other unidentified countries. The sanctions allow the United States to seize one of their assets in the United States and prohibit Americans from participating in transactions with them.
"We will not allow North Korea to jeopardize global cyber security to advance its interests and generate illicit revenues in violation of our sanctions," said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. "The United States is committed to keeping the regime responsible for its cyber attacks and other crimes and destabilizing activities."
North Korea was the last of four major foreign cyber-opponents in the United States to bring charges of hacking against government officials.
Under the Obama administration, charges were laid in 2014 against five Chinese military officers for alleged economic espionage on the Internet and in 2016 against seven Iranian hackers for allegedly disrupting banks' websites and attempted to disrupt a small dam in New York. Last year, the Justice Ministry indicted two Russian spies and two hackers in connection with the theft of Yahoo's 500 million user accounts in 2014.
North Korea, though reclusive and poor, has been very aggressive in cyberspace and was among the first to deploy large-scale disruptive attacks – mainly against its Korean enemy, South Korea.
"North Korea's cyber forces are among the most disruptive in the world today," said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of CrowdStrike, a cyber threat intelligence firm. "Their job continues to grow and their crimes have hurt the global financial system and almost every sector of the global economy."
In the attack against Sony, hackers linked to North Korea have erased data from thousands of computers, stole confidential emails whose content has resulted in the resignation of a leader and pushed the Hollywood studio to release a satirical movie. the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
President Barack Obama, angered by what he saw as an attack on freedom of expression, ordered that sanctions be imposed on Pyongyang, including on the RGB.
According to the complaint, North Korea targeted the studio that directed the film, the AMC theaters that planned to show the film, and a British production company that planned to produce another article about North Korea.
"These are not just attacks on computers," said Tracy Wilkison, the federal prosecutor in Los Angeles where the charges were filed. "These are attacks against freedom of expression."
In 2016, global bankers were shocked to discover that hackers had diverted $ 81 million of accounts to Bangladesh Bank. FBI officials said that hacking was the biggest cybercrime in history, and investigators said the attack was particularly blatant as one government tried to steal a billion dollars from another government.
According to officials, Lazarus Group hackers broke into the bank's computers and manipulated its access to a global electronic messaging system called SWIFT, which banks use to send and receive money transfers.
Using the SWIFT network, hackers cheated the Federal Reserve Bank of New York by sending about $ 81 million to bank accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Most of this money has been sent to Manila casinos and has never been recovered.
Last year, according to officials, RGB-sponsored hackers deployed WannaCry 2.0, a computer virus associated with a ransomware that encrypted data on victims' computers and required money to restore access. This had a significant impact on the service of the UK National Health Service. US and British intelligence linked North Korea to the worm. The researchers say the virus was accidentally dropped before it was ready, an operational mistake making ransom payments easy to track, including by police.
Carol Morello contributed to this report.
[ad_2]
Source link
