While North Korea has been busy launching missiles, it was apparently also budy preparing a global cyberattack
If North Korea is confirmed as the culprit behind the massive ransomware attack known as WannaCry, it raises a question: Why would a country so unpopular around the world risk alienating its few remaining friends?
Among the hardest hit of the 150 countries where the virus spread were China and Russia, North Korea’s traditional allies and its only defenders on the U. N. Security Council. Was Pyongyang trying to send them a message, strutting its technical prowess by holding their computers hostage? Or were the motives purely mercenary rather than strategic?
“There’s an obvious reason why the North would get into the ransomware business, and it’s the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks — because that’s where the money is, ” suggested Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst on North Korea.
One of the world’s poorest countries, North Korea trolls for hard currency through a multitude of criminal schemes that range from drugs to counterfeit currency to smuggling rhinoceros horns. Its missile program is also a money-making operation, but its ability to sell weapons abroad is hampered by U. N. sanctions.
“Just as North Korea proliferates almost everything under the sun for hard currency, it wouldn’t surprise me if they see their hacking skills as another money-making opportunity, ” Terry said.
In the past, North Korea’s army of hackers has taken aim at more obvious targets. The 2014 hacking of Sony Pictures was apparently in retaliation for the film “ The Interview, ” a comedy in which a television journalist was recruited to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The North Koreans have staged hundreds of cyberattacks against media and government organizations, banks and others in rival South Korea.
North Korea might now be shifting the focus of its cyberunits to making money rather than simply mischief. The North Koreans were implicated in last year’s $81 million heist of the Bangladesh central bank account at the Federal Reserve.
