The "Big Four": Spotlight on North Korea

We’re kicking off Eye on Security in 2021 with a nation-state-themed
miniseries that focuses on the big four, which we recognize as North
Korea, Iran, China and Russia. In this episode, host Luke McNamara
invited Fred Plan, Senior Analyst for Mandiant Threat Intelligence,
onto the podcast to talk about North Korea.

Fred started our discussion by providing some background on the
country, how it operates geopolitically, and why they’ve shifted their
focus to a cyber capability. We also review their early cyber
operations that primarily targeted South Korea and their expansion to
the U.S. private sector with the Sony hack. Since then, North Korea
continues to be active in both financially-motivated and
espionage-related operations.

There are a lot of behaviors that make North Korean cyber operations
unique, due in part to the country being very closed off. Their cyber
operations have demonstrated rapid shifts in targeting, which likely
comes at the request of the regime. We most recently saw this with
their targeting of COVID-19 research and vaccine distribution. North
Korea hasn’t publicly reported on any COVID-19 cases, so their cyber
behavior offers us a glimpse into what might actually be going on
within the country.

As always, we like to predict what we’ll see next in a region or from
an actor. In this case, Fred says it’s quite difficult to know what
North Korea is up to next. Find out why when you listen to the
episode.