NSA Links WannaCry To North Korea

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: The National Security Agency has linked the North Korean government to the creation of the WannaCry computer worm that affected more than 300,000 people in some 150 countries last month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. The assessment, which was issued internally last week and has not been made public, is based on an analysis of tactics, techniques and targets that point with "moderate confidence" to North Korea's spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, according to an individual familiar with the report. The assessment states that "cyber actors" suspected to be "sponsored by" the RGB were behind two versions of WannaCry, a worm that was built around an NSA hacking tool that had been obtained and posted online last year by an anonymous group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. Though the assessment is not conclusive, the preponderance of the evidence points to Pyongyang. It includes the range of computer Internet protocol addresses in China historically used by the RGB, and the assessment is consistent with intelligence gathered recently by other Western spy agencies. It states that the hackers behind WannaCry are also called "the Lazarus Group," a name used by private-sector researchers.