North Korean hackers have launched a global cyber espionage campaign in an attempt to steal classified military secrets to support Pyongyang’s banned nuclear weapons programme, the United States, Britain and South Korea said in a joint consultation on Thursday.
The hackers, dubbed Anadrial or APT45 by cybersecurity researchers, have targeted or breached computer systems at a variety of defense or engineering firms, including makers of tanks, submarines, naval ships, fighter jets, and missile and radar systems, the advisory said.
“The writing agencies believe the group and its cyber technologies continue to pose a threat to a variety of industry sectors around the world, including entities in their respective countries as well as Japan and India,” the advisory said.
It was co-authored by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the US National Security Agency (NSA) and cyber agencies, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS).
“The global cyber espionage campaign we have uncovered today highlights the lengths to which DPRK state-sponsored actors are willing to go to advance their military and nuclear programs,” said Paul Chichester of the NCSC, part of Britain’s GCHQ spy agency.
Internationally isolated North Korea, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), has a long history of using covert hacking teams to steal sensitive military information.
In August last year, Reuters exclusively reported that an elite group of North Korean hackers had successfully broken into the systems of NPO Mashinostroyenia, a rocket design bureau based in Reutov, a small town on the outskirts of Moscow.
As was the case with that hack, APT45, part of North Korea’s intelligence agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, used common phishing techniques and computer exploits to trick executives at the companies they were targeting into giving them access to their internal computer systems, Thursday’s advisory said.