Search Results for: lazarus

March 16, 2017

N. Korea, Lazarus & SWIFT: Are the white hats closing in? (Update: SWIFT cuts off remaining N. Korean banks)

In the last month, major news stories about North Korea have bombarded my batting cage faster than I’ve been able to swing at them. I’d wondered when I’d have a chance to cover Katy Burne’s detailed story in the Wall Street Journal about the empty half of the SWIFT glass – that despite its recent decision to disconnect three U.N.-designated North Korean banks, it’s still messaging for banks that are sanctioned by the Treasury Department, but not by the U.N.:...

Categories Cyberwar/Money Laundering/NK Crime/U.S. Law
May 13, 2020

OFAC’s new North Korea (sort of) designations

Today, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control published a colossal list of amendments to the North Korea designations on its list of Specially Designated Nationals—its sanctions blacklist for the financial industry. The amendments are requirements under the new Otto Warmbier North Korea Nuclear Sanctions and Enforcement Act, the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, and the regulations promulgated under those authorities. Today’s announcement is an encouraging sign that the administration is feeling more pressure to enforce these...

Categories Cyberwar/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
March 2, 2020

DOJ indicts 2 Chinese men for laundering stolen South Korean Bitcoin for North Korean hackers

Today, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia unsealed an indictment of two Chinese nationals, Tian Yinyin and Li Jiadong, charging them with money laundering and running an unlicensed money transmitting business, for laundering $100 million in stolen Bitcoin and Ether for North Korean hackers between July 2018 and April 2019. The indictment alleges that the $100 million was part of a $250 million take the Lazarus Group stole from four cryptocurrency exchanges, three of them in South...

Categories Cyberwar/Money Laundering/U.S. Law
March 18, 2019

Chollima Civil Defense just became a serious threat to Kim Jong-un’s misrule (Update: No, it didn’t.)

Update: As of today, it looks like most of what we’ve read about this story was untrue — starting with the lack of evidence that any of the people involved were even North Koreans. They appear to have been U.S., South Korean, and Mexican nationals instead. They aren’t going to publish what they found on the computers, either. They just handed them over to the FBI, which potentially puts the FBI in the difficult position of holding property stolen from...

Categories Resistance
December 11, 2017

Korean War II: A Hypothesis Explained, and a Fisking (Annotated)

(Update, May 2018: A hypothesis should to be tested by its predictive record. I’ve now watched, with growing alarm, how events since the publication of this post have validated it as a predictive model. I’ve recently gone back and embedded footnotes throughout, to indicate which specific predictions have been validated, or not.) In the last several months, as Pyongyang has revealed its progress toward acquiring the capacity to destroy an American city, the North Korea commentariat has cleaved into two...

Categories Fiskings/Korean War II
October 18, 2017

Computer crime, bank fraud & money laundering: A preview of Kim Jong-un’s indictment

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that hackers employed by the government of North Korea have been implicated in yet another international bank fraud scheme using . This time, the victim is a bank in Taiwan, and the take was $60 million, all of it laundered through accounts in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and the United States. In a blog post Tuesday, cybersecurity researchers at U.K. defense company BAE Systems PLC also implicated Lazarus in the Taiwanese theft, saying that tools...

Categories Cyberwar/U.S. Law
July 7, 2017

Stop talking about bombing North Korea. Talk about the revolution it desperately needs.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.  – Sun Tzu On the Fourth of July, I had a long talk with a Famous Person who would probably prefer that I not mention his name here. He’s famous (or infamous — your mileage may vary) for his association with a foreign policy philosophy described as “neoconservative,” whatever that means. Like many Famous Persons, this person’s public image is an injustice to his actual views, which sounded...

Categories Resistance
March 23, 2017

WSJ: Feds may indict North Koreans in Bangladesh Bank fraud

This story just gets more interesting by the day: Federal prosecutors are building cases that would accuse North Korea of directing one of the biggest bank robberies of modern times, the theft of $81 million from Bangladesh’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year, according to people familiar with the matter. The charges, if filed, would target alleged Chinese middlemen who prosecutors believe helped North Korea orchestrate the theft, the people said. The current cases being pursued...

Categories Cyberwar/NK Crime/U.S. Law
March 22, 2017

Royce introduces bill to toughen sanctions on N. Korea; subcommittee holds hearing

The big news yesterday was that Ed Royce, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has introduced a sequel to the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, or NKSPEA. You can read the full text here, but briefly, the bill — Expands the mandatory and discretionary sanctions in NKSPEA 104 to match the sanctions added by UNSCR 2270 and UNSCR 2321. It also adds a few more, like authorizing Treasury to sanction anyone who imports food from North Korea — a...

Categories China/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
March 22, 2017

Top NSA official attributes attempted $1B bank heist to North Korean hackers

The story of the Bangladesh Bank/SWIFT heist has gotten much more interesting of late. Now, not only do we have a senior U.S. intelligence official attributing it to a government, we learn that the North Koreans tried to steal nearly …. A senior National Security Agency official appeared to confirm that North Korean computer hackers were behind a multi-million dollar heist targeting Bangladesh’s central bank last year. Computer hackers attempted to steal $951 million, but only got away with $81...

Categories Cyberwar/NK Crime/Terrorism (NK)
August 31, 2016

N. Korea’s biggest a**hole shoots Vice-Premier, sends second-biggest a**hole to weed the fields

Here at OFK, stories about kremlinology are usually page two material. Too often, we’ll read reports that some official or minor celebrity has been executed, only to read a year later that the target has risen like Lazarus from the KCNA crypt. As a general rule, the closer a story about North Korea is to the center of the power structure, the less I tend to believe it. Which is why I didn’t even tweet the report yesterday that His...

Categories Cyberwar/Kremlinology/Terrorism (NK)
May 27, 2016

Global wave of bank burglaries should revive calls to kick N. Korea out of SWIFT

In recent weeks, I’ve watched with keen interest, and some schadenfreude, as news reports have implicated Pakistani and North Korean hackers in a series of massive bank burglaries involving as many as 12 banks around the world, starting with the theft of $81 million (or $101 million, depending on which report you believe) from the Bangladesh Bank’s account in the U.S. Federal Reserve. These burglaries did not involve guns or ski masks. They were something more like armored car burglaries,...

Categories Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions
December 31, 2015

On His Corpulency’s Secret Service: N. Korea has had a lot of car not-accidents (updated)

Kim Yang-gon, the head of the North’s United Front Department, has become the latest top North Korean official to assume ambient temperature. As head of the UFD, Kim was North Korea’s nearest analogue to the South’s Unification Minister, but he was also responsible for North Korea’s influence and subversion operations inside South Korea. It is one of my ruder habits to point out that the UFD has a rather substantial fifth column at its service in the South. For more...

Categories Anju Links
December 8, 2013

Breaking: N. Korea announces purge of Jang Song Thaek for “anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts” (Updates below)

KCNA has just published a lengthy denunciation of Jang Song Thaek after an unusual, hastily scheduled meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. In this connection, the Political Bureau of the C.C., the WPK convened its enlarged meeting and discussed the issue related to the anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts committed by Jang Song Thaek. [….] The Jang Song Thaek group, however, committed such anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts as gnawing at the...

Categories Anju Links/Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
January 10, 2005

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Lazarus rising: A former South Korean soldier captured by North Korea during the Korean War escaped to China and was arrested by Chinese police while seeking to enter South Korea, a Chinese source said Monday. . . . Another source familiar with North Korea said if South Korean POWs who escaped from the North were extradited to the communist country they were likely to be executed. Returning Han to Pyongyang would be tantamount to sending him to the scaffold, the...

Categories Uncategorized
January 10, 2005

110535895932311677

Lazarus rising: A former South Korean soldier captured by North Korea during the Korean War escaped to China and was arrested by Chinese police while seeking to enter South Korea, a Chinese source said Monday. . . . Another source familiar with North Korea said if South Korean POWs who escaped from the North were extradited to the communist country they were likely to be executed. Returning Han to Pyongyang would be tantamount to sending him to the scaffold, the...

Categories Uncategorized