North Korean hackers have waged a global cyber espionage campaign to try to steal sensitive military secrets to support the Asian country’s banned nuclear weapons program, the United States, Britain and South Korea said in a joint statement on Thursday (25).
The hackers, dubbed Anadriel or APT45 by cybersecurity researchers, targeted or breached systems at a wide range of defense or engineering companies, including manufacturers of tanks, submarines, ships, fighter aircraft, and missile and radar systems, the statement said.
“The agencies believe the group and its cyber techniques continue to pose an ongoing threat to multiple industry sectors around the world, including but not limited to entities in their respective countries, as well as in Japan and India,” they noted.
The note was signed by the FBI, the US intelligence agency, the US National Security Agency and cyber agencies, the UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) and South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.
“The global cyber espionage operation we exposed today shows the lengths to which DPRK state-sponsored actors [Coreia do Norte] are willing to go to pursue their military and nuclear programmes,” said Paul Chichester at the NCSC, part of the British spy agency GCHQ.
History of secret hacking teams
Internationally isolated North Korea, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), has a long history of using secret hacking teams to steal sensitive military information.
In August last year, Reuters exclusively reported that an elite group of North Korean hackers had successfully breached the systems of NPO Mashinostroyeniya, a rocket design bureau based in Reutov, a small city outside Moscow.
As was the case with that hack, APT45 — a part of North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau intelligence agency — used common phishing techniques and computer exploits to trick company employees into giving up access to their internal computer systems, Thursday’s statement said.
Source: CNN Brasil
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