UN investigates 35 cyber attacks committed by DPRK hackers

The UN has released an expanded version of the report on cybercrime in North Korea, revealing new details of the operations of DPRK hackers.

As reported
in a UN secret report last week, DPRK hackers are responsible for stealing $ 2 billion from banks and cryptocurrency exchanges. According to researchers, North Korea used stolen funds to finance the development of weapons of mass destruction.

A new, more expanded version of the report, which hit the Associated Press, states that North Korea carried out at least 35 hacks in 17 countries and that UN experts are investigating these cases. The UN claims that South Korea took the brunt of the attack, bearing 10 attacks. Researchers also note that the South Korean exchange Bithumb was hacked
hackers at least four times.

India became the second country to suffer the largest number of attacks from North Korean hackers – three times the country’s enterprises were attacked. Bangladesh and Chile faced at least two hacks each. Thirteen countries have been affected by attacks once: Costa Rica, The Gambia, Guatemala, Kuwait, Liberia, Malaysia, Malta, Nigeria, Poland, Slovenia, South Africa, Tunisia and Vietnam.

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The report describes the tactics of North Korea’s attacks and notes that three “low-risk, high-return” methods are mainly used to generate illegal proceeds. In addition to targeting cryptocurrencies and users on exchanges, North Korean hackers also attack the SWIFT interbank system, “using the computers and infrastructure of bank employees to send fraudulent messages and destroy evidence.”

In one of the attacks, hackers managed to capture an entire country’s ATM network and redirect 10,000 payments to North Korea. The report also claims that North Korea is mining cryptocurrency through covert mining programs to finance the military.