Hackers’ offensive: LinkedIn, Tesla and New Zealand stock exchange

Hackers from Lazarus Group – linked to North Korea – used LinkedIn in an attempt to steal cryptocurrency. The attack on organizations in at least 14 countries was partially done via a fake job offer made for system administrators within the targeted entity. The offer was used for phishing and extraction of personal information and other private data, necessary to access people’s online accounts and steal bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. Decentralized and semi-anonymous, cryptocurrencies allow North Korea to bypass economic sanctions, launder money and finance its military development.

A member of a Russian hacker group tried to persuade an employee of Tesla cars factory in Nevada to install malware in the company’s computer system offering him a million dollars bribe. Hackers planned to steal valuable data from the company’s network and then download it to the remote server and offer Tesla to ransom it under the threat of releasing the secret information.

For four days of the last week of August New Zealand’s stock exchange failed to resume trading, the result of the disruption caused by cyberattack done from abroad by an undisclosed group. So-called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks target server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic and therefore make its functioning impossible.