North Korea Is On The Attack, Targets Defectors With Malware

North Korea gets its fair share of defectors thanks to its nature of being a country run by a dictator with a penchant for ruthless treatments of citizens. Many of these defectors have become well-known, and as a result, they have become easy targets. Recently, the isolated country is starting to target these defectors with a series of Android malware attacks that are almost scary in their precision.

As Extreme Tech notes, the goal of most malware attacks is to spread as much of the infection as far as possible. However, what North Korea did was to target specific people via Facebook and Google Play. This particular plot was discovered by researchers at the internet security firm McAfee and according to their findings, only about 100 people have been targeted so far.

In terms of how that number compares with the usual casualty counts of malware infections, 100 is exceedingly low. However, this is the point since the attack was highly targeted and was intended to be precise, which makes it even more frightening.

The targets are North Korean defectors that resided in South Korea and the perpetrators of the attacks are apparently the isolated country’s Sun Team. The attacks were carried out over a period of several months and the goal was apparently to gather intelligence with regards to political threats.

It would appear that the attack patterns and resource of the hackers are currently limited, with Zero days being a bit out of their reach right now, Newsweek reports. However, the researchers did note that it might just be a matter of time before they actually do find vulnerabilities to exploit.

Even now, it seems some of the identities of the targets have already been stolen, which can be used for any number of nefarious schemes. This is bound to increase tensions between North and South Korea, and subsequently, with the US.