The U.S. government has issued guidance on North Korean hacking activity in a joint advisory published by the U.S. Departments of State, Treasury, and Homeland Security, and the FBI.
The advisory includes mitigation measures that the international community, network defenders, and the public can take to defend against state-sponsored hacking groups backed by North Korea (formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea aka DPRK), tracked by the US under the HIDDEN COBRA moniker.
Offering a $5 mil award for information to identify and attribute DPRK hackers is a great idea. It’s a comparatively low cost method to gain intelligence on a hard target, and plays to the economic incentives attractive to those in the criminal hacking scene.