Surge Of Attacks On Banking & Finance Using N Korean Tools

For over 200 year’s criminals have been stealing from banks and as methods change we now have phishing and cyber bank theft.  In fact, F-Secure’s Cyber has said in a recent Report that the threat landscape for the finance sector indicates that it might be getting worse, with the cyber-attack capabilities of nation-states spreading to more common cyber criminals

Cyber-attacks pioneered by groups linked with the North Korean government are now being deployed by other threat actors, security specialists at F-Secure have warned. The targeted are often companies and organisations in UK, US, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, Japan, India and elsewhere.

Criminals have various ways in which they can profit from stolen personal data, such as by extorting targeted organisations, selling the data on dark web markets, committing identity fraud, or accessing customer accounts and stealing funds. 

‘While North Korea is a unique case of a nation-state conducting financially-motivated attacks - many of which have been against the banking sector - the techniques used by the country's hacking units have also been adopted by organised crime groups, adding to their repertoire of ways in which to steal from banks.’

In particular, the report added, non-state attackers have been inspired by North Korea to target the banks' SWIFT international payments systems. This probably helped North Korea to steal almost a billion dollars from the Bangladesh Bank in 2016 using the Lazarus group. 

North Korea’s group Lazarus has made similar attacks on other large banks and N. Korea has links to organised crime around the world, including drug running and producing counterfeit currency.

"Attackers compromise a bank's SWIFT payment operators, steal their credentials, and subsequently send fraudulent transfer requests via the SWIFT messaging system.

"When confirmation messages of these transactions are sent back to the compromised back, the attacker's malware intercepts and deletes them, thus removing evidence that the transactions occurred. The illicitly transferred funds get withdrawn from the attackers' accounts by money mules, and the cash is then laundered," the report explained.

The report highlights how attackers are increasingly targeting the financial sector with a range of imaginative attacks in a bid to make big financial gains.

Other attacks on the financial sector include ‘payment switch application compromise': "When a customer goes to withdraw funds from an ATM, a request gets sent to the customer's bank.

"The payment switch application handles this request, conducts a number of checks, for example whether the customer has the required funds in their account, and sends a confirmation - or rejection - message.

"Attackers are compromising these payment switch applications, so that ATM requests made by the attackers' cards are intercepted by the malware. The malware then automatically authorises these requests, regardless of their legitimacy, and the ATM releases unlimited cash for the money mules."

It's not just banks that are being targeted, but financial institutions large and small, including insurance companies, asset managers and other organisations in the financial sector, or the supply chain of financial organisations.

"North Korea has been publicly implicated in financially-motivated attacks in over 30 countries within the last three years," said George Michael, a senior research analyst at F-Secure talking to Computing Magazine. He continued: "This is symbolic of a wider trend that we've seen in which there is an increasing overlap in the techniques used by state-sponsored groups and cyber criminals."

Michael added that simply throwing money at IT security isn't enough either. "We continue to see companies suffer from unsophisticated breaches despite having spent millions on security.

"Once you understand why various threat actors might target you, then you can more accurately measure your cyber risk, and implement appropriate mitigations."

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