North Korean .Gov Hackers Back With Fake Pen-Test Company

A North Korean government-backed APT group has been caught using a fake pen-testing company and a range of sock puppet social media accounts in an escalation of a hacking campaign targeting security research professionals.

The notorious hacking group, first exposed by Google earlier this year, returned on March 17th with a website for a fake penetration testing company.

“The new website claims the company is an offensive security company located in Turkey that offers pentests, software security assessments and exploits,” according to Adam Weidemann, a researcher in Google’s TAG (Threat Analysis Group).

Like previous websites used by this actor, Google said the new website even has a link to a PGP public key at the bottom of the page that was connected to the earlier January attacks.

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“In January, targeted researchers reported that the PGP key hosted on the attacker’s blog acted as the lure to visit the site where a browser exploit was waiting to be triggered,” Weidemann explained.

In addition to the fake “SecuriElite” security assessment company, the campaign also included a batch of carefully crafted social media profiles used to lend credibility to the fake outfit.

Google’s Weidemann explains:

The attacker’s latest batch of social media profiles continue the trend of posing as fellow security researchers interested in exploitation and offensive security. On LinkedIn, we identified two accounts impersonating recruiters for antivirus and security companies. We have reported all identified social media profiles to the platforms to allow them to take appropriate action.

At this time, we have not observed the new attacker website serve malicious content, but we have added it to Google Safebrowsing as a precaution.

Weidemann said the group has already used exploits for zero-days in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and warns that the threat actor has advanced capabilities.

“Based on their activity, we continue to believe that these actors are dangerous, and likely have more 0-days. We encourage anyone who discovers a Chrome vulnerability to report that activity through the Chrome Vulnerabilities Rewards Program submission process,” Weidemann added.

Google released data on multiple fake Twitter handles, sock puppet LinkedIn profiles, and attacker-controlled websites belonging to the North Korean APT group.