U.S. blames N. Korea for cyberattack

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration is publicly blaming North Korea for a ransomware attack that infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide in May and crippled parts of Britain’s National Health Service.

Homeland security adviser Tom Bossert wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Monday night that North Korea was “directly responsible” for the WannaCry ransomware attack and that Pyongyang will be held accountable for it.

Bossert said the administration’s finding of responsibility is based on evidence and confirmed by other governments and private companies, including the United Kingdom and Microsoft.

“North Korea has acted especially badly, largely unchecked, for more than a decade, and its malicious behavior is growing more egregious. WannaCry was indiscriminately reckless,” he wrote.

Bossert said the Trump administration will continue to use its “maximum pressure strategy to curb Pyongyang’s ability to mount attacks, cyber or otherwise.”

The WannaCry attack struck more than 150 nations in May, locking up digital documents, databases and other files, and demanding a ransom for their release.

It battered Britain’s National Health Service, where the cyberattack froze computers at hospitals across the country, closing emergency rooms and bringing medical treatment to a halt. Government offices in Russia, Spain, and several other countries were disrupted, as were Asian universities, Germany’s national railway and global companies such as automakers Nissan and Renault.

The WannaCry ransomware exploited a vulnerability in mostly older versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Affected computers had generally not been patched with security fixes that would have blocked the attack. Security experts, however, traced the exploitation of that weakness back to the U.S. National Security Agency.

Microsoft President Brad Smith likened the theft to “the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen” and argued that intelligence agencies should disclose such vulnerabilities rather than hoarding them.

The United States and South Korea have accused North Korea of launching a series of cyberattacks in recent years, though North Korea has dismissed the accusations.

Baik Tae-hyun, a spokesman of South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which deals with matters related to North Korea, said Monday that the Seoul government was examining whether the North was behind hacking attacks on a cryptocurrency exchange in June. About $7 million in digital money was stolen in the hacks, South Korean officials said.

There’s speculation in the South that North Korean hackers are possibly targeting cryptocurrency like bitcoin to evade the heavy financial sanctions imposed over the country’s nuclear weapons and missiles program.