A paper about Lazarus Group

The Lazarus Group’s activity spans multiple years, going back as far as 2009. Its malware has been found in many serious cyberattacks, such as the massive data leak and file wiper attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014; the cyberespionage campaign in South Korea, dubbed Operation Troy, in 2013; and Operation DarkSeoul, which attacked South Korean media and financial companies in 2013.
There have been several attempts to attribute one of the biggest cyberheists, in Bangladesh in 2016, to Lazarus Group. Researchers discovered a similarity between the backdoor used in Bangladesh and code in one of the Lazarus wiper tools. This was the first attempt to link the attack back to Lazarus. However, as new facts emerged in the media, claiming that there were at least three independent attackers in Bangladesh, any certainty about who exactly attacked the banks systems, and was behind one of the biggest ever bank heists in history, vanished. The only thing that was certain was that Lazarus malware was used in Bangladesh. However, considering that we had previously found Lazarus in dozens of different countries, including multiple infections in Bangladesh, this was not very convincing evidence and many security researchers expressed skepticism abound this attribution link.
This paper is the result of forensic investigations by Kaspersky Lab at banks in two countries far apart. It reveals new modules used by Lazarus group and strongly links the tools used to attack systems supporting SWIFT to the Lazarus Group’s arsenal of lateral movement tools.
Considering that Lazarus Group is still active in various cyberespionage and cybersabotage activities, we have segregated its subdivision focusing on attacks on banks and financial manipulations into a separate group which we call Bluenoroff (after one of the tools they used).