The nation-state actor is looking to speed up vaccine development efforts in North Korea.
The advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Lazarus Group and other sophisticated nation-state actors are actively trying to steal COVID-19 research to speed up their countries’ vaccine-development efforts.
That’s the finding from Kaspersky researchers, who found that Lazarus Group widely believed to be linked to North Korea recently attacked a pharmaceutical company, as well as a government health ministry related to the COVID-19 response. The goal was intellectual-property theft, researchers said.
“On Oct. 27, 2020, two Windows servers were compromised at the ministry,” according to a blog posting issued Wednesday. Researchers added, “According to our telemetry, [the pharmaceutical] company was breached on Sept. 25, 2020….[it] is developing a COVID-19 vaccine and is authorized to produce and distribute COVID-19 vaccines.”