The Lazarus Heist: From Hollywood to High Finance: Inside North Korea's Global Cyber War
By Geoff White Published in August 2022 304 Pages Thibault’s Score: 3/5 I remember growing up learning about the insane isolated state of North Korea. However, what most people do not realize is that under Kim Jong Un, North Korea significantly began opening up. North Korea opened up by becoming a hub of global organized crime. North Korea has pivoted several times. First, it started printing “superdollars.” Superdollars are very high quality US dollar counterfeits. They were developed in North Korea’s labs by the country’s top scientists. Later, Korea began getting involved in the production of illegal drugs. North Korea would finally hit the jackpot when it discovered cybercrime. The communist educational system produced many high level computer scientists but no private sector to employ them. The government provided a select hand picked few with work opportunities, where they would get access to the uncensored internet. North Korean hackers would spend the 2010s doing a wide variety of crimes. They would hack Sony in retribution for a film that satirized North Korea’s leadership. They would steal money from Bangladesh’s central bank. They would unleash ransomware which would hold people’s computer files hostage unless they ponied up Bitcoin. They would create mock credit cards and use runners to withdraw cash. I found that accounts of North Korean money laundering to be the most interesting aspect of this book. Learning the details - and how investigators uncovered said details - kept me on the edge of my seat. Something about the book’s writing felt very sterile. The author felt very removed from the action. Simultaneously, there was sometimes too much of a focus on the humans involved and not the big picture. I would recommend this book to people who want to learn more about North Korea’s cyber operations.
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