WASHINGTON/TORONTO: The USgovernmenton Tuesday issued a rare alert on the activities of a hackinggroup it dubbed "Hidden Cobra," saying the group was part of theNorth Korean government and that more attacks were likely.
The joint alert from the USDepartment of HomelandSecurity and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that"cyber actors of the North Korean government" had targeted themedia, aerospace and financial sectors, as well as criticalinfrastructure, in the United States and globally.
North Korea has routinely denied involvement in cyberattacks against other countries.
The North Korean mission to theUnited Nations was not immediately available for comment.
The alert said Hidden Cobra has compromised a range ofvictims since 2009 and that some intrusions had resulted inthefts of data while others were disruptive.
The group´scapabilities include denial of service attacks, which send reamsof junk traffic to a server to knock it offline, keyloggers,
remote access tools and several variants of malware, the alertsaid.
Hidden Cobra commonly targets systems that run olderversions of Microsoft Corp operating systems that areno longer patched, the alert said.
North Korean hacking activity has grown increasingly hostilein recent years, according to Western officials and cybersecurity experts.
The cyber firm Symantec Corp said last month it was"highly likely" that a hacking group affiliated with North Koreacalled Lazarus Group was behind the WannaCry cyber attack thatinfected more than 300,000 computers worldwide, disruptingoperations at hospitals, banks and schools.
Tuesday´s alert said Hidden Cobra´s cyber attacks have beenpreviously referred to by private sector experts as LazarusGroup and Guardians of the Peace, which have been linked toattacks such as the 2014 intrusion into Sony Corp´sSony Pictures Entertainment.