DOJ charges more hackers in Sony, WannaCry attacks

Three North Korean hackers are accused of participating in a conspiracy to extort $1.3 billion in cash and cryptocurrency.

Rae Hodge Former senior editor

Rae Hodge was a senior editor at CNET. She led CNET's coverage of privacy and cybersecurity tools from July 2019 to January 2023. As a data-driven investigative journalist on the software and services team, she reviewed VPNs, password managers, antivirus software, anti-surveillance methods and ethics in tech. Prior to joining CNET in 2019, Rae spent nearly a decade covering politics and protests for the AP, NPR, the BBC and other local and international outlets.

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Rae Hodge

Feb. 17, 2021 10:19 a.m. PT

The Department of Justice on Wednesday unsealed a federal indictment against three North Korean military hackers for participating in a series of cyberattacks, including the 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment; creating the notorious WannaCry ransomware virus; spear-phishing US defense contractors; and hacking several cryptocurrency exchanges. These latest charges expand the government's 2018 case, adding two new defendants as well as additional schemes, in what the DOJ alleges is a "wide-ranging criminal conspiracy" to extort $1.3 billion in cash and cryptocurrency from banks and companies globally.

DOJ officials said the three defendants were part of North Korean military hacking units, known in the cybersecurity community as Lazarus Group and APT38. One of the defendants, Park Jin Hyok, was previously charged in a complaint unsealed in 2018.

"As laid out in today's indictment, North Korea's operatives, using keyboards rather than masks and guns, are the world's leading 21st century nation-state bank robbers," the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's National Security Division, John Demers, said in a release. "The department will continue to confront malicious nation-state cyber activity with our unique tools and work with our fellow agencies and the family of norms abiding nations to do the same."

A second, related case that was unsealed on Wednesday said a Canadian-American citizen pleaded guilty to money laundering for the North Korean hackers, including for a "cyber-enabled bank heist."