WannaCry Ransomware Shares Code With North Korean Malware, Says Researchers

New submitter unarmed8 quotes a report from CyberScoop: The ransomware known as WannaCry that spread rapidly to 300,000 machines in 150 countries over the past few days shares code with malware written by a group of North Korean hackers known as the Lazarus Group. While the shared code is important, experts warned that it's far from proof about who created and launched the ransomware attacks. Neel Mehta, a security researcher at Google, first pointed out the shared code on Monday on Twitter. The link was quickly echoed by numerous other experts. "From a technical point of view those two functions and their references are identical," said Matt Suiche, founder of United Arab Emirates-based cybersecurity firm Comaeio. "From an attribution point of view a ransomware would subscribe to the narrative of Lazarus Group, which is stealing money like we saw with multiple financial institutions with fraudulent SWIFT transactions -- having a nation-state powered ransomware leveraging crypto currency would be a first."