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North Korean Hackers Infiltrate Chile's ATM Network After Skype Job Interview (zdnet.com)
A Skype call and a gullible employee was all it took for North Korean hackers to infiltrate the computer network of Redbanc, the company that interconnects the ATM infrastructure of all Chilean banks. From a report: Prime suspects behind the hack are a hacker group known as Lazarus Group (or Hidden Cobra), known to have associations to the Pyongyang regime, is one of the most active and dangerous hacking groups around, and known to have targeted banks, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency exchanges in the past years. Lazarus' most recent attack took place at the end of December last year but only came to the public's attention after Chilean Senator Felipe Harboe called out Redbanc on Twitter last week for not disclosing its security breach. The company, which has direct lines into the networks of all Chilean banks, formally admitted to the hack a day later in a message posted on its website, but that announcement didn't include any details about the intrusion. However, a day after Redbanc's admission, an investigation conducted by Chilean tech news site trendTIC revealed that the financial firm was the victim of a serious cyber-attack, and not something that could be easily dismissed. According to reporters, the source of the hack was identified as a LinkedIn ad for a developer position at another company to which one of the Redbanc employees applied.
It's not "after a skype interview", but rather "after the user opened a malicious executable which compromised the system". How is this newsworthy again?
North Korea has nothing to gain by doing flippant things like this
Actually, they do gain. If NK behaved like a "normal" country, they would be treated like one. But by regularly engaging in batshit insane behavior, they lower expectations so much that when we sit down to negotiate with them, we are happy to accept any outcome that is even halfway sane, even they though have a long pattern of not keeping their word.
The Kim family regime has controlled NK for more than 70 years. Even longer than the Castro family has controlled Cuba. Their strategy of egregious behavior has worked well for them.