The United States Justice Department has named three North Koreans – Jon Chang Hyok, Kim Il, and Park Jin Hyok – as wanted for a string of cyberattacks around the world. The hackers allegedly stole US$1.3 billion and crippled the UK's NHS computers during the 2017 Wannacry incident.
President Joe Biden's administration has targeted North Korea and claimed it has a special department of hackers who are responsible for a “global campaign of criminality.”
The US Justice Department unveiled an indictment on Wednesday, 17 February, against three North Koreans accused of being part of the secretive Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), which is better known among hackers and cybersecurity firms as the Lazarus Group, or APT 38.
The Americans claim North Korea, struggling under the weight of UN sanctions, launched a series of cyber attacks to steal money and cryptocurrency from financial institutions and individuals around the world using malware.
All three of the men it has named – Jon Chang Hyok, 31, Kim Il, 27, and Park Jin Hyok, 36, are believed to be in North Korea but Park was charged in absentia in 2018 with a cyber attack on Sony Entertainment four years earlier.
That attack was believed to have been carried out in revenge for Sony funding a Seth Rogen movie, The Interview, which poked fun at Kim Jong-un.
Park is also accused of creating the WannaCry 2.0 ransomware, which brought down the NHS computers and many other servers in 2017, and the theft of US$81 million…
