North Korean state now uses cyber attacks to steal cash, says report
July 31, 2017 Leave a comment
North Korea’s intelligence establishment has shifted its attention from spying for political gain to spying for commercial advantage –primarily to secure funds for the cash-strapped country, according to a new report. Since the 1990s, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has used computer hacking in order to steal political and military secrets from its rivals. But there is increasing evidence that Pyongyang is now deploying armies of computer hackers in order to steal cash from foreign financial institutions and internet-based firms. This is the conclusion of a new report by the Financial Security Institute of South Korea, an agency that was set up by Seoul to safeguard the stability of the country’s financial sector.
The report, published last week, analyzed patterns of cyber attacks against South Korean state-owned and private financial institutions that took place between 2015 and 2017. It identified two separate computer hacking groups, which it named Lazarus and Andariel. According to the report, both groups’ activities, which are complementary, appear to be directed by the government of North Korea. An analysis of the groups’ targets suggests that Pyongyang has been directing its computer spies to find ways to secure hard currency for use by the government. Foreign currency has been increasingly hard to come by in North Korea in recent years, due to a host of international sanctions that were imposed on the country as a form of pressure against its nuclear weapons program.
Several cyber security experts and firms have claimed in recent months that North Korea has been behind recent cyber attacks against international banking institutions. The DPRK has also been blamed for a 2014 attack against the Hollywood studios of the Japanese multinational conglomerate Sony. Regular readers of intelNews will recall our story in March of this year about comments made on the subject of North Korea by Rick Ledgett, a 30-year veteran of the United States National Security Agency. Speaking at a public event hosted by the Aspen Institute in Washington, Ledgett expressed certainty that the government of North Korea was behind an attempt to steal nearly $1 billion from Bangladesh Bank —the state-owned central bank of Bangladesh—in 2016. Eventually the bank recovered most of the money, which were made through transactions using the SWIFT network. But the hackers managed to get away with approximately $81 million.
More recently, cyber security experts have claimed that the government of North Korea has been behind attempts to hack into automated teller machines, as well as behind efforts to steal cash from online gambling sites. In April of this year, the Russian-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab identified a third North Korean hacker group, which it named Bluenoroff. The Russian experts said Bluenoroff directed the majority of its attacks against foreign financial firms. There are rumors that Pyongyang was behind the wave of WannaCry ransomware attacks that infected hundreds of thousands of computers in over 150 countries in May. But no concrete evidence of North Korean complicity in the attacks has been presented.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 31 July 2017 | Permalink
A cyber espionage group that has alarmed security researchers by its careful targeting of government agencies has links to the Iranian state, according to a new report. The existence of the group calling itself CopyKittens was first confirmed publicly in November of 2015. Since that time, forensic analyses of cyber attacks against various targets have indicated that the group has been active since at least early 2013. During that time, CopyKittens has carefully targeted agencies or officials working for Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, the United States, and Germany, among other countries. It has also targeted specific offices and officials working for the United Nations.
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The unmarked grave of a Dutch-born Nazi spy, who killed himself after spending several months working undercover in wartime Britain, will be marked with a headstone, 76 years after his death by suicide. Born in 1914 in The Hague, Holland, Englebertus Fukken joined the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands, the Dutch affiliate of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party led by Adolf Hitler, in 1933. In 1940, shortly after the German invasion of Holland, Fukken, who had been trained as a journalist, was recruited by the Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence. Abwehr’s leadership decided to include Fukken in the ranks of undercover agents sent to Britain in preparation for Operation SEA LION, Germany’s plan to invade Britain.
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Industrial espionage damages a country’s long-term productivity, study finds
August 1, 2017 by Joseph Fitsanakis 1 Comment
The history of industrial and economic espionage by governments is indeed extensive. It includes lucrative efforts by the United States to steal industrial production methods from Europe in the 19th century, and successful attempts by the Soviet Union to steal atomic technology from the American-led Manhattan Project in the 1940s. But there have been no systematic attempts to evaluate the effect of state-sponsored industrial espionage on the entire economy of the sponsoring nation –until now.
This new study –the first of its kind– was carried out by two economists, Erik Meyersson, from the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden, and the Spain-based Albrecht Glitz of Pompeu Fabra Univeristy in Barcelona. The two researchers describe their preliminary findings in a working paper entitled: “Industrial Espionage and Productivity”, published by the Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany. Its findings are based on an analysis of nearly 152,000 declassified industrial-espionage-related communiqués sent by Stasi spies to their handlers between 1970 and 1988. The communiqués were examined with reference to their date of authorship and the content-descriptive keywords appended to them by the Stasi.
The report concludes that stealing industrial secrets can boost a nation’s economic activity in the short run. However, in the long run, a nation’s strategic focus on industrial espionage tends to impede homegrown research and development, and ultimately stifles technological productivity on a national scale. This is because “easy access to secrets” from abroad tends to “discourage both state and private investment in research and development”, according to Meyersson and Glitz. That is precisely what happened to East Germany, argues the report. The country’s total factor productivity (TFF –the growth of its output measured in relation to the growth in inputs of labor and capital) rose significantly as a result of its industrial espionage.That was especially noticeable in the digital electronics sector, where the output gap between East and West Germany was narrowed by a fourth. However, that trend was temporary, and East Germany was never able to develop an organic digital-electronics industry. Industrial espionage is like “research and development on cocaine”, professor Meyersson told Science, the magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Maybe you can have a little bit of fun with it, but it’s not good for you in the long run”.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 01 August 2017 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with academic research, Albrecht Glitz, Cold War, East Germany, economics, Erik Meyersson, industrial espionage, scientific intelligence, Stasi (GDR)