In an astonishing statement released by Israel Ministry of Defense yesterday, the country’s IT infrastructure functioning for the defense sector was targeted by a cyber attack that could have brought the entire nation to knees. However, the good news is that that defense ministry’s threat monitoring teams were proactively prepared to thwart such attacks in advance, that saved the nation from embarrassment in the international circuit.
Israel’s Ministry of Defense disclosed that North Korea’s state funded ‘Lazarus Group’ was behind the attack, and the objective of the attack was to steal classified information from Israel’s defense industry to sell that data to Iran.
ClearSky, the UK based Cybersecurity firm says that the Lazarus Group infiltrated the military network of Israel and has stolen large amounts of sensitive data that could prove costly for the Tel Aviv as Iran is planning to take revenge on Israel for targeting its Natanz Nuclear Facility with a cyber attack a few weeks ago.
Note 1- Reports are in that the attack was launched on Israel’s defense sector in June this year when a fake LinkedIn profile of Dana Lopp sent a message to a senior engineer working for a government-owned company of Israel. The message stated that ‘Dana Lopp’ was a HR recruiter for Boeing and has been assigned with the task of hiring few engineers for the world renowned company.
After establishing a contact with the engineer, the fake recruiter wisely took on some details of the engineer such as the contact email address and the phone number so they could connect via WhatsApp for future correspondence.
As the entire conversation was carried out in American English by the fake profile, the senior engineer might have thought that the fake Dana Lopp was real in genuine.
ClearSky researchers say that hackers from Lazarus Group do not have proficiency in English and so the conversation with the senior engineer might have been done by some hired tele-calling executives.
Note 2- There is indeed a talent recruiter with the name Dana Lopp working for Boeing in real. And it’s clear that the said person has NO connection with the cyber attack launched by the Lazarus Group.
