Hey look, a real photo of a hacker
Legendary North Korean hacker Kim PwnYu
This is the best summary I could come up with:
North Korea-backed hackers are once again targeting security researchers with a zero-day exploit and related malware in an attempt to infiltrate computers used to perform sensitive investigations involving cybersecurity.
Similar to the previous campaign TAG reported on, North Korean threat actors used social media sites like X (formerly Twitter) to build rapport with their targets.
Once a relationship was developed with a targeted researcher, the threat actors sent a malicious file that contained at least one 0-day in a popular software package.
Upon successful exploitation, the shellcode conducts a series of anti-virtual machine checks and then sends the collected information, along with a screenshot, back to an attacker-controlled command and control domain.
The post said that in addition to exploiting the current zero-day, the same hacking group appears to be sharing software that also targets researchers.
The researchers urged anyone who has run the software to “ensure your system is in a known clean state, likely requiring a reinstall of the operating system.” The post includes file hashes, IP addresses, and other data people can use to discern if they’ve been targeted.
The original article contains 553 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Can someone tell me what 0-day is?
It’s a vulnerability that’s discovered and exploited before it’s known to or addressed by the maker/vendor. So in this case, the North Korean hackers were exploiting an unknown vulnerability in a software package commonly used by security researchers.
Thanks! That’s pretty close to what I thought it was. However it looked like it was being referred to as a specific tactic or program. Thanks for clearing it up!
It’s a computer vulnerability or exploit which has not been discovered before (or at least the software developer wasn’t aware of it).
0-day comes from the number of days the software developers have been informed of the vulnerability. Normally security researchers will tell a company about an exploit and give them some time to fix it before telling the public.