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WannaCry Ransomware Shares Code With North Korean Malware, Says Researchers (cyberscoop.com)
New submitter unarmed8 quotes a report from CyberScoop: The ransomware known as WannaCry that spread rapidly to 300,000 machines in 150 countries over the past few days shares code with malware written by a group of North Korean hackers known as the Lazarus Group. While the shared code is important, experts warned that it's far from proof about who created and launched the ransomware attacks. Neel Mehta, a security researcher at Google, first pointed out the shared code on Monday on Twitter. The link was quickly echoed by numerous other experts. "From a technical point of view those two functions and their references are identical," said Matt Suiche, founder of United Arab Emirates-based cybersecurity firm Comaeio. "From an attribution point of view a ransomware would subscribe to the narrative of Lazarus Group, which is stealing money like we saw with multiple financial institutions with fraudulent SWIFT transactions -- having a nation-state powered ransomware leveraging crypto currency would be a first."
Got to create some more support for bombing North Korea right?
Even though there's zero chance NK was actually involved in this amateur hour ransomware the relevant news sites will pick it up as "North Korea in cyber attack against the West. OMG!" thus pushing the warmongering agenda further along, softening up the credulous and easily led...
Usually I'm as pacifist.. though in this situation I've reconsidered.
No matter whether it's North Korea, Russia, or whomever.... Whoever is trying the "death by a million cuts" strategy against my country... be warned:
Yamamoto was right. We'll take it for a little while, settle our internal issues, and turn your countries into a mini mall.
You've been warned.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Now it comes from North Korea? Who wrote this movie? It makes no sense.
who leaves unregistered domain fir kill switch hidden under the hood? certainly, state actors are better then that.
One thing N. Korea lacks is resources/money to buy stuff (from China and Russia). They are the most prolific counterfeiter of $100... and then the $100 bill was changed. It seems entirely plausible that they are trying to replace their counterfeiting with cybercrime.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Either North Korea is an impoverished dictatorship that could never, ever launch a successful ICBM and routinely runs out of energy and food, or its an underground powerhouse releasing some of the deadliest malware to date and rivals the US and Russia in technical prowess.
Theres also the unresolved dependency that this exploit came from the NSA. Nice try.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Ransomware decrypts Taiwanese netizen's computer due to his low income...
http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3161826
Malware authors steal from each other all the time. Sometimes you see a patchwork of different styles and skill-levels and constructs that make not any sense, except if a later attacker did not really understand the code he was modifying. Still interesting though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
NK has earned itself megatons of bad publicity by keeping South Korea at the edge of war for two generations, by kidnapping people at random off Asian beaches, and most recently by taking American hostages.
But now, with war threatening and their starvation problem not getting any better, NK may think it is doing us a favor by destroying Windows. It would be as if the last remnants of ISIS were to come up with a cure for Ebola.
Except that the Lazarus group isn't North Koreans, it's a group of South Koreans who are amused by the media giving the credit to North Korea.
Isn't that a misnomer? I mean come'on, the whole country of North Korea doesn't even have Internet access. How can they even have hackers?
Who says that everyone based in North Korea is working for the government? We don't assume every US hacker works for the CIA, do we? Especially in countries such as NK, China, Russia, I would first assume that they are simple criminals, or maybe people trying to make a fortune and then get the hell out of there (which takes a lot of money. I just moved to another country, just within Europe, and it cost me a fortune).
Judging from the country I know a little about - Russia - I'm sure you can find ties to the government, the police, maybe the secret service. But that's not necessarily because the whole operation is a government operation. It could very well be simple corruption. The criminals and the police are closer to each other than us ordinary people are to either of them. That's true for western countries as well, but not to the same degree.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Let me guess, if this ransomware spread happened 15 years ago should we have blamed it on Iraq? So that we can bomb it later ... Common guys! Stop spreading ugly propaganda news.
The No Such Agency people.
Gosh, how convenient. The US government has been looking for an excuse to have a go at North Korea, and now some ransonware appears to have a tenuous link to the country.
Kind of like the same way Iraq was harbouring Weapons of Mass Destruction. We'd best nip this in the bud as soon as possible.
stop trying to blame them for everything. There is no proof, just wild speculation and dishonest accusations by the U.S. It's not working.
See my subject: You'll always have issues as you STEAL others' code & ones like SQLite bugs too I noted https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10606043&cid=54411855/ - In this case?
* You can't even apply DIRECT ATTRIBUTION as to who wrote what here...
APK
P.S.=> OpenSORES also "backfired" on JOOgle via Chrome EFast malware - Which is WHY I won't reveal the code I write, RIGHT there (dumb move of Google that was - but OH YEAH - that's right - >b?Google DIDN'T EVEN WRITE CHROME iirc (they picked it up off someone who DID actually write it))... apk
north korea and cryptocurrency deserve each other, good riddance to both.
The three letter agencies can make software or traffic "appear" to come from where ever they want.
Snowden proved this, he exposed their tricks of spoofing addresses and embedding foreign language clues in the code.
If the NK leader made more of a deal about this, I don't think he would find it too hard to get pen testers to go and work for him for a while. Sure people would be tentative at first, but once proven, and I suppose you don't have to go over there, work remotely.
Actually, he could probably get all those with an interest in nuclear but don't work for their government because of drug screening to hop on over to NK.
He could offer off shore banking as well, he would need a big team of software developers.
An off shore company in NK would be excellent, you could sell all your digital wares through NK, bank there and pay no tax.
With all of this going on, North Korea wouldn't want to launch a nuclear attack. For world peace let's make Korea great again.