Reports said that Japan’s national police have pinned North Korean hacking group, Lazarus, as the organization behind several years of crypto-related cyber-attacks.
It has been reported that in the public advisory statement sent out on October 14, Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA) and Financial Services Agency (FSA) sent a warning to the country’s crypto-asset businesses, asking them to stay vigilant of “phishing” attacks by the hacking group aimed at stealing crypto assets.
However, the advisory statement is known as “public attribution,” and according to local reports, is the fifth time in history that the government has issued such a warning. The statement warns that the hacking group uses social engineering to orchestrate phishing attacks — impersonating executives of a target company to try and bait employees into clicking malicious links or attachments.
The statement added:
“This cyber attack group sends phishing emails to employees impersonating executives of the target company [...] through social networking sites with false accounts, pretending to conduct business transactions [...] The cyber-attack group [then] uses the malware as a foothold to gain access to the victim’s network.”
The report said that according to the statement, phishing has been a common mode of attack used by North Korean hackers, with the NPA and FSA urging targeted companies to keep their “private keys in an offline environment” and to “not open email attachments or hyperlinks carelessly.”
The statement added that individuals and businesses should “not download files from sources other than those whose authenticity can be verified, especially for applications related to cryptographic assets.” The NPA also suggested that digital asset holders “install security software,” strengthen identity authentication mechanisms by “implementing multi-factor authentication” and not use the same password for multiple devices or services.
Thus, the NPA confirmed that several of these attacks have been successfully carried out against Japanese-based digital asset firms, but didn’t disclose any specific details. Lazarus Group is allegedly affiliated with North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, a government-run foreign intelligence group.
Source: Cointelegraph