How to spot a North Korean bot

As extensive joint military exercises between U.S. and South Korean forces wound down in late August, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security updated a warning on the North Korean government's attack botnet infrastructure.

The FBI and DHS initially warned in June that North Korea was using a government-managed botnet infrastructure they dubbed "Hidden Cobra," to aim distributed denial-of-service attacks at media, aerospace, financial and critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and around the globe.

Older, unpatched versions of Adobe's Flash media player and Microsoft's Silverlight video player were cited as potential attack vectors.

The warning and detailed update come as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea spike as the U.S. tries to back the country off of a path to international nuclear strike capabilities. North Korea, along with China, Russia and Iran, have been on the federal government's short list of potent cyber threat sponsors for some time.

An Aug. 23 update posted on the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team provides more technical details on the operation and how to detect the North Korean bots on networks.

The two agencies identified the IP addresses of "DeltaCharlie" malware that North Korea used to manage its DDOS botnet infrastructure and updated detection and file information on the malware. The CERT notice includes indicators of compromise, malware descriptions, network signatures and host-based rules to help network defenders detect activity, that is allegedly driven by the North Korean government

CERT said it had obtained three files associated with DeltaCharlie attack malware, which were designed to conduct three types of attacks to open the door for DDOS assaults.

The files, said the warning, set up backdoor command-and-control capabilities on compromised systems, allowing malicious operators to take command controls and capabilities from the victim system, to tailor DDOS attack techniques.