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North Korea denies its involvement in recent hacker attack as ridiculous — UN envoy

Such allegations are part of the United States’ hostile policies, North Korea’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Kim In Ryong said

UNITED NATIONS, May 19. /TASS/. North Korea denies allegations about its involvement in the recent global cyber attack as ridiculous, North Korea’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Kim In Ryong said on Friday.

"Relating to cyber attack, this linkage to DPRK is ridiculous," he said, adding that such allegations are part of the United States’ hostile policies as the US side is in the habit of mounting a loud anti-North Korean campaign each time something out of the ordinary happens.

On May 12, hackers tried to attack Windows OS computers in 74 countries. A total of 45,000 ransomware cyber attacks were carried out across the world, while most of the attempts at infecting computers were registered in Russia. Hackers asked for a bitcoin ransom payment to unlock infected computers. Some reports say that they had used a hacking tool developed by the US National Security Agency.

Computers of the Russian Emergencies Ministry, Interior Ministry, the Russian Railways company and one the country’s biggest banks, Sberbank, as well as the Megafon and Vimpelcom mobile phone operators, were attacked.

Russia’s Central Bank said in a statement that cyber attacks on the country’s banks had been registered which had not caused any damage.

On May 16, Reuters said citing a Kaspersky Lad analyst that code snippets spotted in a WannaCry earlier editions had been used by hackers from Lazarus Group presumably operated from North Korea. Google’s security specialist Neel Mehta said on the same day that WannaCry and other virus programs had been found to contain a common snippet used by Lazarus Group hackers.

Cyberscoop said however that these facts are not enough to say that Pyongyang was behind the recent global attack as code snippets are often borrowed to save time or to accuse somebody wrongfully.