At the end of last month, cybersecurity experts from the specialized company Mandiant (a subsidiary of Google) reported that the North Korean government hacking group known as “Kimsuky” attempted to carry out attacks against the German company Diehl Defence, which manufactures the IRIS-T missiles for South Korea’s KF-21 Boramae fighter jet. It is worth noting that the first launch of these missiles from the future South Korean aircraft took place last year, alongside tests of the Meteor missiles from MBDA to ensure the aircraft’s strike capabilities.
Currently, the hacker group’s method involved sending emails to Diehl Defence employees, offering a potential (false) opportunity to work for U.S. defense companies. The details were supposedly contained in an attached PDF document, which, when opened, initiated a malware download that allowed the attacker to spy on the affected computer’s activities.
The deception displayed a considerable degree of care in its preparation. According to the Mandiant report, the servers hosting the cyberattack were named “Uberlingen,” identical to the name Diehl Defence gave to its facilities in Constanza. Additionally, the communications had been aesthetically modified to reflect features typical of companies such as Telekom and GMX; this led researcher Michael Barnhart to state that the North Korean group had conducted thorough research prior to the attack.
Finally, it is useful to mention that when consulted by local media, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) stated that there has recently been a greater focus of the Kimsuky group (also sometimes referred to as APT43) on targets in Germany, describing it as a “German campaign.” However, the BSI itself claims to already know the suspicious network addresses of the attacked server, which were also obtained from the investigation of other similar attacks.
*Images used for illustrative purposes.
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