Ep. 5: The Heists
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How did the Sony hack teach North Korea about profitable cybercrime?
After Sony, one thing became abundantly clear. Kim Jong-un would not be mocked. Not by Hollywood, not by Seth Rogen, not from a half a world away. But inside North Korea, his vendettas aren't just destructive, they're deadly. Kim has purged longtime allies, executed officials, even family members. Nick Carlson tracked these episodes from his former post at the FBI. Kim Jong-un actually had an alias. He had a Brazilian passport, and he traveled the world in the 90s under that identity. And the man who escorted him was named Park Kyung-mu, and he posed as Kim Jong-un's father. So this is another man who was executed by Kim Jong-un, somebody who he spent his childhood with. But I kind of wonder about what kind of a person would kill the man who posed as his father for some slight or embezzlement or something.
It's really brutal. South Korea's spy agency says it has information that North Korea executed its defense chief for sleeping during a meeting and talking back to young leader Kim Jong-un. Jang Song-taek was at the North Korean leader's right hand, at the very heart of this regime. He was Kim Jong-un's uncle and mentor. He was executed by machine gun.
How did attackers use spear‑phishing to breach the Bank of Bangladesh?
These vendettas extend from politically motivated to purely petty. Kim Jong-un is a big wine drinker, imports a lot of wine for himself into North Korea, got upset at a wine distributor based in China related to some wine distribution deal, and in August decided to just wipe out their network. That's Eric Chen, who leads a team of reverse engineers at Broadcom. He spent years dissecting the code behind North Korea's biggest hacks. But in terms of its cyber vendettas, North Korea learned something fundamental after Sony. Destructive cyber attacks make headlines. Financial cyber attacks make money. Here's Ari Redbird, who heads up global policy at TRM Labs and before that led financial and terrorism investigations at Treasury.
You know, in the Sony Pictures context was, hey, we could create disruption or maybe we could steal usernames and passwords on the Internet to all of a sudden, wow, we can actually steal money that we can launder and use. And that same tradecraft you use to wipe a company off the map, you can use it to rob a bank. I'm Nicole Perleroth, and this is To Catch a Thief. Sony began with something simple, a spear phishing email. But what North Korea perfected in that attack was far more dangerous, the ability to quietly learn a network, map it from the inside, find the crown jewels, then weaponize them for maximum impact. And while we were still reeling from Sony, North Korea's hackers turned that same playbook on banks, and one bank in particular, the Bank of Bangladesh.
Here's Eric Chen again. Way back in January of 2015, North Korean attackers were creating personas, creating email accounts, and conducting online research about email addresses and Bangladesh bank employees. they started sending friendly job inquiries to the bank's employees, along with a link to a resume and cover letter. They pretended they were a guy named Razal Alam, and they said, I'm Razal Alam, and I'm extremely excited about the idea of becoming part of your company. Here's my resume and cover letter. But it wasn't just a resume. That document actually was an executable. Instead of just displaying his resume on your screen, it would actually begin running code on your system. And just like that, North Korea's hackers were inside the bank.
But they didn't steal money right away. They waited. And this is critical, especially when you think about the North Korean IT workers lurking in our systems today. They spent nearly a year mapping the bank's network, studying how the systems work together, hunting for the bank's connection to something called SWIFT. SWIFT is the mechanism in which banks all over the world transfer money. But SWIFT itself doesn't transfer the money. SWIFT is really a communications protocol, like a chat messaging system that allows banks to send messages to each other to say, hey, I want to transfer two million from this account to this account.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
How did the Sony hack teach North Korea about profitable cybercrime?
0:03–1:24
2
How did attackers use spear‑phishing to breach the Bank of Bangladesh?
1:24–5:51
3
How did the attackers manipulate SWIFT to attempt a $951M heist?
5:51–11:06
4
What mistakes caused the Bangladesh heist to yield only $81M?
11:06–14:31
5
How did North Korea pivot from bank hacks to ransomware and WannaCry?
14:31–1:00:34