UN experts investigate targeted North Korean cyberattacks on 17 countries

United Nations specialists are investigating 35 incidents in which North Korea launched cyberattacks against 17 countries.

Last week, the Associated Press wrote that North Korea was able to get a total of $ 2 billion through cybercrime.

“The report to the Security Council gives details on some of the North Korean cyberattacks as well as the country’s successful efforts to evade sanctions on coal exports in addition to imports of refined petroleum products and luxury items including Mercedes Benz S-600 cars”, — points out Associated Press.

Cyberattacks mainly targeted financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges. Most of all traffic from North Korea went to its closest neighbor – South Korea, it was attacked 10 times.

“South Korea’s Bithumb, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, was reportedly attacked at least four times”, — reported in UN report.

India took second place – 3 attacks on the country, Bangladesh and Chile share third place with two attacks.

All other attacked countries suffered from only one attack, among them: Costa Rica, Gambia, Guatemala, Kuwait, Liberia, Malaysia, Malta, Nigeria, Poland, Slovenia, South Africa, Vietnam and Tunisia.

According to experts, they are trying to find in cyberattacks the fact of violations of UN sanctions.

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Currently, experts see three ways in that cybercriminals in North Korea attacked other countries:

1. Attacks through the SWIFT system, which is used to transfer funds between banks.
2. Theft of digital currency – in this case, attacks were carried out both on exchanges and on users.
3. Malicious cryptocurrency mining.

According to a report from one unnamed country cited by the experts, stolen funds following one cryptocurrency attack in 2018 “were transferred through at least 5,000 separate transactions and further routed to multiple countries before eventual conversion” to currency that a government has declared legal money, “making it highly difficult to track the funds.”