US to Officially Blame North Korea for Wannacry Cyber Attack

Back in early May, a series of cyber attacks were carried out with the Wannacry ransomware, hitting a number of countries and doing considerable damage. At the time, officials noted some common code with the “Lazarus Group,” which officials had previously blamed on North Korea.

This was enough, at the time, to insinuate North Korea was behind Wannacry, though researchers warned it was “well short of poof,” and that copying snippets of code is not uncommon among unrelated hacker groups.

The latest reports, however, suggest the US is going to formally accuse North Korea of the attacks soon. It doesn’t appear that there is any new actual evidence, but the CIA has endorsed the dubious previous evidence recently, which seems to have the accusation a new lease on life.

What the point of this blame will be remains uncertain, other than piling on amid rising tensions with North Korea. If anything, it may serve to close the book on the hacking incident, which may appeal to US officials since the so-called “Lazarus Group” code was in great measure implementations of NSA-discovered exploits, even though the White House has insisted this definitely wasn’t the NSA”s fault.