JERUSALEM: The Israeli defence ministry said on Wednesday that it had foiled an attempted cyber attack by a foreign group targeting the country’s defence manufacturers.

It said the attempt was made by “an international cyber group called Lazarus, an organisation that is backed by a foreign country.”

The United States has linked Lazarus to North Korea, but the Israeli statement did not identify the country concerned, nor did it say when the attempted attack took place or which firms it targeted.

“The cyber-attacks were identified in real time, and thwarted,” Israel’s defence ministry said in a statement, adding that “no harm or disruption” was caused.

In March the US Treasury sanctioned two Chinese citizens and accused them of working with Lazarus Group, blamed for an April 2018 hack of an unnamed crypto-currency exchange in which about $250 million was stolen.

Last September, Washin­gton issued sanctions against three North Korean entities accused in cyber-attacks, including the Lazarus Group, which was allegedly involved in the theft of around $80 million from the central bank of Bangladesh. It was also accused of being behind the WannaCry attack in 2017 that affected approximately 300,000 computers worldwide, including in the US, Canada and New Zealand.

Published in Dawn, August 13th, 2020