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.
Labor Unions
#MAYDAY • 2017-05
Operation GoldenAxe described suspected North Korean watering-hole activity from June 2016 to May 2017 that compromised more than ten South Korean organization websites tied to diplomacy, aviation, North Korea affairs, unification, parliament, labor, and finance. The attackers abused compromised association and institutional websites to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in widely deployed South Korean ActiveX software, delivering malware for remote control, information theft, and additional payloads, with encryption logic, protocol elements, and C2 command overlap with malware previously attributed by South Korean authorities to North Korea; FSI’s Rifle reporting separately preserved Andariel-linked context for the MAYDAY activity set.
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