November 19, 2021

Researchers at Proofpoint recently uncovered a spying campaign launched by state-sponsored North Korean cyber attackers.

The group, known as TA406, is part of several groups identified as Kimsuky that focus mainly on espionage, money-grabbing, malware distribution, phishing, intelligence gathering and cryptocurrency theft.

The group targets several countries, including North America, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, South Africa, India, and others, and uses phishing emails embellished with topics related to nuclear safety, politics, and Korean foreign policy to target high-ranking elected officials.

Some of the tactics used in phishing attacks involve imitating real people using basic HTTP authentication, which displays a browser dialog asking for the user’s documents.

Once an deployed malware is opened, the file creates a scheduled task called “Twitter Alarm,” which allows the threat actors to deploy additional payloads every 15 minutes. Once executed, the EXE also opens a web browser to a PDF file of a legitimate NK News article hosted on the actor’s infrastructure.

For more information, read the original story in Bleeping Computer.