It is a known fact that South Korea is holding 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang County’s Olympic Stadium (Winter Olympics 2018 venue) between Feb 9th to Feb 25th of this year. We also know that it has recently made a peace treaty with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to spare its sporting event from cyber attacks.
Although Kim Jong meticulously confirmed that his hackers won’t interfere in the Winter Olympics, researchers from MacAfee say a different story after taking ground reality into account.
Yesterday, cybersecurity firm McAfee released a press report saying that the Pyeongchang county Olympics have already been plagued by state-sponsored cyber attacks from Russia and North Korea.
The security firm adds in its report that North Korea is continuing its espionage on the South Korean Olympics-related organization from the past two months and is still into it, despite the announcement made by Kim Jong that he and his government will support South Korea organize the Winter Olympics 2018 event in a peaceful manner.
McAfee report suggests that the sporting event has already been attacked on two occasions with two different cyberattack campaigns- The first one happens to be Operation GoldDragon where hackers attempted to plant 3 distinct spyware tools on target machines that would enable transmission of data to remote servers from compromised computers. McAfee identified the three malicious tools as GoldDragon, BravePrince, and Ghost419.
The research firm said that the above-said campaign could have been launched by Russian intelligence, while the second attack could have been the work of some private hackers working for Kim Jong of North Korea.
In both cases, the attacks were carried out with malware filled email phishing campaigns written in the Korean language.
Security Researchers from McAfee conclude that the cyber attack campaign hasn’t ended yet, as more could be observed in coming days or as soon as the Winter Olympics 2018 South Korea commences in the second week of this February.
