US Believes North Korea is Behind $81 Million Dollar Banking Theft

Schtask

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 29, 2011
Messages
436
US Federal Prosecutors are gearing up for an inquiry into North Korea's involvement in last year's $81 million dollar Bangladesh heist.

Threat actors created a bit of malware that allowed them to interact directly with the SWIFT interbank messaging system. With the malware in place, cyber criminals were able to mark all transactions as valid, manipulate data, and delete fraudulent transactions. The bank of Bangladesh reported that it took nearly four days to stop unauthorized payments due to printer and software issues. Those issues were later attributed to malicious code targeted at those systems to keep them from tracking and reporting the transactions that were taking place.

Investigators began suspecting North Korea as the perpetrator after a very specific piece of code was discovered that was also used in the Sony Pictures breach.
 
Last edited:
Maybe we should hack them back or seize any assets they have outside of their country.

We already know that some of these countries have engaged in the counterfeiting of US money over the years, so this is believable. Just wonder who the stole the malware from.
 
81mil? Thats it?

Well, we are talking about third world country with a starving population, robbing another third world country also with a poor population. :p

Well, the drums of war are active!

I highly doubt Bangladesh has a military capable of taking on North Korea, even if they have the means to project force that far, and I doubt anyone else in the world is willing to go to war on their behalf. In the modern age, unless you are a dictatorial strongman riding a wave of nationalism, it is very costly to go to war, when it comes to popularity in the polls.

And that's not to mention the financial cost of doing so. In a modern world where a Tomahawk cruise missile costs about $1.5 million per shot, it means you fire about 50 of those bad boys and you've spent the same as was stolen on missiles alone, not to mention the cost of transportation, distribution, and getting the platforms (ships?) there to support the effort.

While dictatorial strongmen like Putin can go to war to seize territory and otherwise rile up the population, democracies today only go to war over serious security based geopolitical issues, like - for instance - North Korea's missile and nuke programs.

North Korea is a particularly tricky one to strike, too. Not because they have a particularly sophisticated military. (They have a very large military, but it's mostly men with small arms, not modern high tech stuff). Instead its because of the massive amounts of old school artillery they have lined up along the border to South Korea. They have long threatened that any military intervention would cause indiscriminate retaliatory artillery fire into civilian areas south of the border.

Essentially they are holding millions of civilians in south Korea hostage via artillery. Unlike Iron Dome in Israel, you can't shoot down artillery shells. They are also difficult to find to take out with airstrikes, as they can hide in the forest, without any targeting radars or anything like that to give their position away.

Anyone who takes action against North Korea (except maybe China) thus risks a massive number of south Korean civilian deaths.

So, it's tricky.
 
Well, we are talking about third world country with a starving population, robbing another third world country also with a poor population. :p



I highly doubt Bangladesh has a military capable of taking on North Korea, even if they have the means to project force that far, and I doubt anyone else in the world is willing to go to war on their behalf. In the modern age, unless you are a dictatorial strongman riding a wave of nationalism, it is very costly to go to war, when it comes to popularity in the polls.

And that's not to mention the financial cost of doing so. In a modern world where a Tomahawk cruise missile costs about $1.5 million per shot, it means you fire about 50 of those bad boys and you've spent the same as was stolen on missiles alone, not to mention the cost of transportation, distribution, and getting the platforms (ships?) there to support the effort.

While dictatorial strongmen like Putin can go to war to seize territory and otherwise rile up the population, democracies today only go to war over serious security based geopolitical issues, like - for instance - North Korea's missile and nuke programs.

North Korea is a particularly tricky one to strike, too. Not because they have a particularly sophisticated military. (They have a very large military, but it's mostly men with small arms, not modern high tech stuff). Instead its because of the massive amounts of old school artillery they have lined up along the border to South Korea. They have long threatened that any military intervention would cause indiscriminate retaliatory artillery fire into civilian areas south of the border.

Essentially they are holding millions of civilians in south Korea hostage via artillery. Unlike Iron Dome in Israel, you can't shoot down artillery shells. They are also difficult to find to take out with airstrikes, as they can hide in the forest, without any targeting radars or anything like that to give their position away.

Anyone who takes action against North Korea (except maybe China) thus risks a massive number of south Korean civilian deaths.

So, it's tricky.

See, that would be the logical course of action, but we know that the warmongers in the white house are looking for any excuse to invade NK and 81 M is nothing to them, if they can continue their perpetual war that they are so fond off.
 
Well yeah seems we want to find state actor everywhere.

Well, to be fair, it has been a LONG term (decades) assessment by the intelligence community that North Korea uses various forms of state sponsored organized crime to bring in the money in order to support their nuclear and missile programs. The country is isolated and poor and couldn't afford these things in any other way. They can't even afford to feed their people.

The whole cyber crime angle of this is even more amusing considering the country essentially has no internet, outside of a few state sponsored sites.
 
Ah, the Russia/China/Iran/North Korea roulette again
 
I'm putting all my money on the Nigerian Princes and their armies of Western Union goblins.

Crixus-Spartacus-Manu-Bennett-Gaul-gladiator-f.jpg
 
North Korea is a particularly tricky one to strike, too. Not because they have a particularly sophisticated military. (They have a very large military, but it's mostly men with small arms, not modern high tech stuff). Instead its because of the massive amounts of old school artillery they have lined up along the border to South Korea. They have long threatened that any military intervention would cause indiscriminate retaliatory artillery fire into civilian areas south of the border.

Essentially they are holding millions of civilians in south Korea hostage via artillery. Unlike Iron Dome in Israel, you can't shoot down artillery shells. They are also difficult to find to take out with airstrikes, as they can hide in the forest, without any targeting radars or anything like that to give their position away.

Which just means that if we ever have to attack them, we will have to start by carpet bombing the entire border area until there is nothing left.
 
NK has the conventional artillery version of MAD. Perhaps the Trump WH is batshit crazy enough not to care about the leveling of Seoul in order to finally take care of NK (to say nothing of China's response), but I hope not, as I'm sure South Korea does as well.

We need to just infect their water with herpes or some kind of STD that is super irritating but easily treatable; then hand out treatment to all defectors at the border. :p
 
NK has the conventional artillery version of MAD. Perhaps the Trump WH is batshit crazy enough not to care about the leveling of Seoul in order to finally take care of NK (to say nothing of China's response), but I hope not, as I'm sure South Korea does as well.

We need to just infect their water with herpes or some kind of STD that is super irritating but easily treatable; then hand out treatment to all defectors at the border. :p


I'm thinking more along the lines of super deniable nuclear "accident" in their main nuclear and missile research facility. :p
 
I'm thinking more along the lines of super deniable nuclear "accident" in their main nuclear and missile research facility. :p

That too...although the fallout going downwind also wouldn't be a great outcome for the South.

Too bad HAARP doesn't really could control the weather, I'm sure NK would be under about 10 feet of water already.
 
Well, we are talking about third world country with a starving population, robbing another third world country also with a poor population. :p



I highly doubt Bangladesh has a military capable of taking on North Korea, even if they have the means to project force that far, and I doubt anyone else in the world is willing to go to war on their behalf. In the modern age, unless you are a dictatorial strongman riding a wave of nationalism, it is very costly to go to war, when it comes to popularity in the polls.

And that's not to mention the financial cost of doing so. In a modern world where a Tomahawk cruise missile costs about $1.5 million per shot, it means you fire about 50 of those bad boys and you've spent the same as was stolen on missiles alone, not to mention the cost of transportation, distribution, and getting the platforms (ships?) there to support the effort.

While dictatorial strongmen like Putin can go to war to seize territory and otherwise rile up the population, democracies today only go to war over serious security based geopolitical issues, like - for instance - North Korea's missile and nuke programs.

North Korea is a particularly tricky one to strike, too. Not because they have a particularly sophisticated military. (They have a very large military, but it's mostly men with small arms, not modern high tech stuff). Instead its because of the massive amounts of old school artillery they have lined up along the border to South Korea. They have long threatened that any military intervention would cause indiscriminate retaliatory artillery fire into civilian areas south of the border.

Essentially they are holding millions of civilians in south Korea hostage via artillery. Unlike Iron Dome in Israel, you can't shoot down artillery shells. They are also difficult to find to take out with airstrikes, as they can hide in the forest, without any targeting radars or anything like that to give their position away.

Anyone who takes action against North Korea (except maybe China) thus risks a massive number of south Korean civilian deaths.

So, it's tricky.

This was more true 25 years ago than it was today. With sat tech, we know where all the artillery pieces are. Large numbers of cruise missiles and light bombers could taken out the lion's share in a coordinated effort with a nighttime airborne drop and artillery of our own.

Of course one would have to assume that some of them wouldn't be knocked out. You can bet those sim numbers have already been run a million times over at the Pentagon.

A bigger problem is China and how they would respond. They're itching for a fight and are terrible at reading people.
 
Why not just use suxnet version 2.1 to do something to the something so that something happens with total plausible deniability?
 
Why is it always the case that these hackers seems to pull all stops on getting quality code, but no one ever thinks to hire a copy editor?
 
A bigger problem is China and how they would respond. They're itching for a fight and are terrible at reading people.

If we attack without serious provocation China is going to lose their minds.
 
It would be nice to solve the North Korea issue though. At some point freeing their population has to become more important than the lives that will be lost. How long are we going to let millions live in nigh-slavery just so the Dear Leader can be the only person in that country to live a decent life? In effect hundreds of lives are being lost every day, lives that never knew a day of freedom, whenever North Koreans die of old age, let alone all the ones dying in slave labor camps. If any president, even Trump who I despise, can bring about a reunification of Korea with less than, say, ten thousand non-North Korean casualties, I'd say its easily a win and should be done.
 
I love how the article says the US Government should get involved. Last I checked, SWIFT wasn't owned by the US or even a US company. They also don't like us spying into it, not that they could stop us.
 
$81 million dang their gross worth just went up 90,000%
 
Sooner or later someone in NK will make a mistake and fire a missile China's way and then a regime change will occur ...blah blah blah... The US is not the Wold Police and while I'm confident that a US backed SK would win fairly quickly, it's going to be the bloodiest, messiest thing we've seen in a long time. Chemical and biological weapons, sleeper agents everywhere, smuggled nukes....
 
NK is getting crazy enough right now that even China is getting worried; not because NK can do anything to China, but if NK gets taken out then the likely group to fill the void is SK/US.

That being said, no one wants to wipe out NK, especially SK. If NK were to be totally annihilated in a new Korea war, the likely outcome is reunification with SK. SK, although well off, doesn't have the money to rebuild NK and take care of all of those people. It will turn into a humanitarian clusterfuck.

The more likely scenario is assassination and regime change. The previous concept was to replace Kim Jong-un with his half-brother...until (allegedly) NK assassinated him in Feb this year. So now a new leader needs to be found who is not pro-Chinese...unless China does the assassinating themselves and putting a pro-China leader in place.
 
Some people like the idea of "getting their monies worth" when it comes to our military. But I don't think that's the right solution even though Kim Jong-un is a little annoying prick.

There just needs to be a legit election of a non-corrupted leader and then allow trade and capitalism to open up. Countries around the world would flood that country with charity if they allowed them self to be helped.

I just don't get why China wants NK to stick around so bad. What good does one more puny communist country do for them? It only keeps the US off their borders. Even then, why does China care if we're by their border, it's not like we're enemies with them.
 
Even then, why does China care if we're by their border, it's not like we're enemies with them.

We aren't let's-start-a-shooting-war enemies, but we are economic, global influence, and cyber enemies. It's also for long-term China safety. We might not be in an actual war today, but maybe we will be in the future...why let the world's #1 military sit right next to your border, more than we already are today?
 
Back
Top