Andariel is a threat group that the Korean Financial Security Institute designated as a subgroup of Lazarus, as Kaspersky reported in 2021. AhnLab described it in 2018 as active since 2015 and linked its activity to earlier operations against South Korean organizations. Its targets span military and defense bodies, political organizations, security and technology companies, energy research, banks, cash machines, cryptocurrency exchanges, and other financially relevant businesses. Characteristic access methods include spear-phishing documents with macros, watering holes that exploit locally used ActiveX software, attacks on centralized management products, and supply-chain compromise. By 2018 it was also expanding reconnaissance beyond Internet Explorer, collecting browser and software details from compromised Korean websites. Activity observed from 2020 into 2021 showed further evolution toward staged in-memory loaders, interactive backdoor use, and selectively deployed custom ransomware, combining intelligence collection with direct financial gain.
Interpark
#Interpark • 2016-03
🇰🇷 Korea, Republic of
South Korean investigators attributed the Interpark breach and extortion case to North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau after an employee PC was compromised via a spearphishing attachment, malware spread internally, and attackers reached systems used by personnel with access to customer-data databases. The intrusion involved internal reconnaissance, credential and access-control abuse, database theft, exfiltration through employee PCs, and extortion for financial gain, making it an early example of DPRK-linked operations combining personal-data theft with criminal monetization against a major Korean online service.
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5
Related Reports
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Affected Countries
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125
Months Since
Related Actors
First seen: 2017-07 •
Last seen: 2026-06