Cybersecurity

North Korean Hackers ‘Expanding in Scope and Sophistication’

Cybersecurity company FireEye warned in a report today about the expansion of a North Korean cyber espionage group known as APT37 (Reaper), which was behind the exploitation of an Adobe Flash zero-day vulnerability earlier this year.

“We assess that the actors employing this latest Flash zero-day are a suspected North Korean group we track as TEMP.Reaper. We have observed TEMP.Reaper operators directly interacting with their command and control infrastructure from IP addresses assigned to the STAR-KP network in Pyongyang,” FireEye said in a Feb. 2 post. “The STAR-KP network is operated as a joint venture between the North Korean Government’s Post and Telecommunications Corporation and Thailand-based Loxley Pacific. Historically, the majority of their targeting has been focused on the South Korean government, military, and defense industrial base; however, they have expanded to other international targets in the last year. They have taken interest in subject matter of direct importance to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) such as Korean unification efforts and North Korean defectors.”

In the new update, FireEye says the group is being tracked as APT37 and operations “are expanding in scope and sophistication, with a toolset that includes access to zero-day vulnerabilities and wiper malware.”