At South Korean security companies that sell anti-malware software and security solutions, the North Korean state-sponsored hackers group recently posed as Samsung recruiters to target their employees with fake job offers.
It is being reported that this state-sponsored North Korean hackers group has been tracked as “Zinc,” aka Lazarus and this hackers group is well-known for targeting security researchers, as seen in past campaigns.
The emails sent with fake job offers to the security researchers include malicious PDF that claims to be job information for a role at Samsung. Here, the malicious PDF was malformed by the hackers in such a way, that whenever the victim will try to open the malicious PDF it will not open in a standard PDF reader.
At this point, when the victim is unable to open the job offer PDF, they raise complain, and then hackers play their key role by sending them a link to a Secure PDF Reader app.
Since they offer PDFTron, which is a Secure PDF Reader app through Google Drive, but, Google claims that the PDFTron package provided by the hackers was a modified version of PDFTron, as it’s modified to install a backdoor trojan on the victim’s systems.
Here below, we have mentioned all the actions that could be performed by the hackers on the compromised systems:-
Here, we have mentioned all the vulnerabilities that were exploited:-
Google TAG (Threat Analysis Group) attributed all these attacks to the North Korean hacker’s group, Zinc APT, and in late 2020 and throughout 2021, this same group also targeted security researchers on Twitter and other social networks.
Here are the security resources offered by Google Cloud:-
Here are a few recommendations offered by the security experts:-
This time instead of targeting the South Korean anti-malware companies, the hackers have targeted their employees. Since hacking their employees could provide them extra benefits or access to other key means, and by exploiting them they can easily execute a supply chain attack.
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