North Korea may be doubling down on its efforts to make money by hacking, according to new research by cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.
“From a tradecraft perspective, the Lazarus Group now looks more like a criminal enterprise than a nation-state,” Ryan Kalember, Proofpoint’s senior vice president of cybersecurity strategy, told The Hill.
The Lazarus Group, an industry name for the believed-to-be North Korean hackers that breached Sony Pictures and launched the disastrous WannaCry malware, has already been linked to several different attempts to generate revenue by hacking. The group was tied to a string of bank robberies using the SWIFT inter-bank transfer request system totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as recent attempts to phish cryptocurrency exchanges.
Proofpoint explains in a new report that Lazarus has started infecting South Korean credit card terminals, called point of sale (POS) systems, to steal credit card information.
The firm believes this would make North Korea the first known nation to steal credit cards this way.
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