Coronvirus Phishing Campaign Targets Six Nations

The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has reportedly instructed the hacker group, Lazarus, to use phishing scams to steal bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. Singapore, Japan, and the US are amongst six nations reportedly targeted in a COVID-19 themed phishing campaign.

The Lazarus Group has committed some notable crimes, such as the WannaCry ransomware attacks, hacking Sony, and stealing $81 million through cyberspace from the Bangladesh Central Bank.  Their latest scam is sending crypto executives an email about an open Chief Financial Officer position that contains an infected Microsoft Word document.

The North Korean state hacker group Lazarus are said to be ready to massively attack more than 5 million businesses and individuals who will receive phishing email messages from spoofed government accounts. This would include 8,000 organisations in Singapore where the business contacts highlighted in an email template were addressed to members of the Singapore Business Federation (SBF), according to a report from cybersecurity vendor Cyfirma. 

SBF is responsible for promoting Singapore businesses and currently represents 27,200 companies. The targeted Singapore businesses would reportedly receive phishing email messages, written in Chinese, from a fake Ministry of Manpower account, supposedly offering additional payouts for employees under the government's COVID-19 support packages. 

Opening the document attachment would trigger malware that would enable access to the victim’s computer.

It noted that governments in the six targeted nations all had announced funding support for enterprises and citizens to help them ride out the global pandemic, including Singapore, which said it would set aside almost SG$100 billion, and Japan, which unveiled 234 trillion yen in stimulus funds. 

Singapore's national cyber security agency SingCERT confirmed it received "information regarding a potential phishing campaign". It said there were "always" ongoing phishing attempts by various cyber-criminals that used different themes and baits and spoofed different entities.

This tactic remained a common and effective technique used to gain access to individuals' accounts, deliver malware, or trick victims into revealing confidential data.

Cyfirma said the phishing campaign was designed to impersonate government agencies and departments as well as trade associations that had been instructed to oversee the distribution of the COVID-19 financial aid. Their analysis identified seven email templates impersonating government agencies and business associations. 

SingCERT:       ZDNet:        CoinOunce:       Bitcoinist:

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