Microsoft takes control American, Japanese, South Korean Domains after attack from North Korean Hackers

On Monday, a North Korean Hacker group called Thallium hacked into web domains with the target of launching a cyberattack on human rights activism. The targetted activists, researchers, government employees, think tanks, university staff etc., leading Microsoft to take control of the hacked domains. Most of the above-mentioned targets were based in the United States of America, Japan and South Korea.

According to Microsoft’s statement, the US federal court allowed the company to take control of over 50 domains that fell into the attack by Thallium. It was further found out that Thallium used the hacking technique known as “spear phishing,” where they used credible-looking emails that can fool you to believe that they are legitimate.

They illegally used Microsoft brands and trademarks to make the mails look credible. As soon as they got the target victim’s credentials, they can hack into anything and access their emails, phone calls, contacts, calendar appointments, forward new mails and utilise any other relevant data.

According to Tom Burt, Microsoft’s vice-president for customer security and trust, this network was used to target and compromise victim’s security and online accounts while infecting their computers to steal sensitive information by using Malware.

The company said this was the fourth nation-state group against whom Microsoft took legal action. Before that, there were similar operations done by nation-state groups from China, Russia and Iran that were dubbed as Barium, Strontium and Phosphorus.

Cybercrimes are a constant problem with smaller-scale crimes and attacks happening in different places. By hacking into one car, one can hack all vehicles in the city. Building and trading cyberweapons like malware are commonly making it easy to access if you know where to find.

There are several countermeasures being taken by governments and companies but some might lack basic stuff. Yet, there is a hack every 39 seconds making cybercrime more profitable than the illegal drug trade. Traditional firewall and antivirus are of no use as the hackers grow so do technology need to grow.