A Security Pro Hacked North Korean Hackers. He Found They’d Breached Hundreds of Networks Worldwide
A cybersecurity researcher successfully infiltrated North Korean hacking servers, uncovering evidence of breaches across 1,640 organizations in 57 countries. The findings reveal that state-sponsored hackers have gained high-level access to major global entities, including hospitals and cryptocurrency firms.
Why it matters
This discovery exposes the massive scale and sophistication of North Korean cyber-espionage and the vulnerability of global infrastructure.
Since Greece-based cybersecurity researcher Vangelis Stykas gained access to North Korean systems 22 months ago, he says, he has found evidence that 1,640 companies across 57 countries have been impacted by the country’s hacking operations. Among these, Stykas will detail at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today, around 700 to 800 of the impacted organizations have had “really damaging” intrusions.
“It’s company access, it’s root access to servers, it’s root access to AWS,” the researcher tells WIRED, referring to Amazon Web Services and the term “root” to mean the highest level of permissions in a computer system. “For crypto companies, it’s keys, it’s blockchain access—it’s ridiculous access.”
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