In January, Google and Microsoft outed what they stated was North Korean government-sponsored hackers focusing on safety researchers. The hackers spent weeks utilizing pretend Twitter profiles—purportedly belonging to vulnerability researchers—earlier than unleashing an Web Explorer zero-day and a malicious Visible Studio Undertaking, each of which put in customized malware.
Now the identical hackers are again, a Google researcher said on Wednesday, this time with a brand new batch of social media profiles and a pretend firm that claims to supply offensive safety providers, together with penetration testing, software program safety assessments, and software program exploits.
As soon as extra with feeling
The homepage for the pretend firm is modern and appears no totally different from numerous actual safety firms everywhere in the world:
The hackers additionally cooked up greater than a dozen new social media profiles that presupposed to belong to recruiters for safety firms, safety researchers, and varied staff of SecuriElite, the pretend safety firm. The work that went into creating the profiles was pretty spectacular.
Subsequent-level trolling
My favourite is that this Twitter profile of @seb_lazar, which presumably corresponds to Sebastian Lazarescue, one of many pretend researchers working for the pretend SecuriElite:
Safety individuals all know that Lazarus is the identify used to establish hackers backed by the North Korean authorities. Creating detailed Twitter and LinkedIn profiles for a researcher along with your pretend safety firm, naming him Sebastian Lazarescue, and having him retweeting a lot of top-flight safety researchers—some who work for Google—is next-level trolling.
Adam Weidemann, a researcher with Google’s Menace Evaluation Group, cautions that the hackers’ previous success in luring researchers to web sites internet hosting an IE zero-day means the group ought to be taken critically.
“Primarily based on their exercise, we proceed to imagine that these actors are harmful, and sure have extra 0-days,” he wrote.
