North Korea hasn’t stopped launching cyberattacks amid peace talks

As Kim Jong-un speaks publicly about nuclear disarmament, North Korea’s hacker army continues to launch cyberattacks against different businesses across Asia, Europe and the U.S., according to private sector analysts and former U.S. officials. Experts from several cybersecurity firms — Dell SecureWorks, McAfee, Symantec, FireEye and Recorded Future — all told CyberScoop that activity from North Korea has stayed steady or grown in volume since peace talks gained steam earlier this year. The activities of these Pyongyang-linked hacking groups largely focuses on financial theft and covertly stealing digital secrets. While affected companies have quietly dealt with the onslaught in recent months, their contracted cybersecurity firms confidentially collected and studied recent malware samples that show the North Koreans are still actively developing new iterations of their toolsets. “Similar to operations conducted prior to that date [circa January], North Korean actors have engaged in broad cyber espionage using a Destover-variant tool, developed and […]

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DHS wants help to identify, attribute major web outages

The Department of Homeland Security wants help identifying, attributing and combatting major internet outages and disruptions — and it will pay. Last week, at an industry day and in solicitation documents posted online, the department’s Science and Technology Directorate invited research proposals under its “Predict, Assess Risk, Identify (and Mitigate) Disruptive Internet-scale Network Events,” or PARIDINE. These large-scale internet outages or slowdowns can have many causes, explained PARIDINE program manager Ann Cox — from natural disasters like hurricanes or tsunamis, to accidents that can knock out physical infrastructure, through geo-political events like a country trying to cut itself off from the internet, to the mass-scale re-routing of internet traffic. Large-scale re-routing incidents can happen by accident; but they can also be caused by malicious actors using a technique called border gateway protocol, or BGP, hijacking. On Twitter, security analyst Richard Bejtlich called BGP hijacking, “Probably[the] biggest Internet weakness hardly any[one] knows/cares about.” […]

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