White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert speaks about the WannaCry virus, which was tied to North Korea, during a briefing at the White House in Washington on Dec. 19, 2017. Pyongyang is generally meticulous in its planning for cyberattacks.
In July, we noted that the Islamic republic has been playing the numbers game in the world of cyberattacks, using relatively rudimentary tactics in a shotgun approach that targets thousands of individuals in the hopes that a small percentage become victims. Now, the recent release of a U.S. Department of Justice criminal complaint depicts a similar, yet very different, threat from North Korea over the past four years. In addition to laying out in technical detail why North Korea was the mostly likely perpetrator of attacks on Sony Pictures in 2014, Bangladesh Bank in 2016, the WannaCry attacks in 2016 and 2017, and dozens of other lower-profile attacks in between, the complaint revealed many new insights into how the North Koreans allegedly crafted their operations to conduct those attacks.
