May 3, 2024 at 03:24PM
The NSA and FBI warned of APT43, a North Korea-linked hacking group exploiting weak DMARC policies to launch spearphishing attacks. The attacks aim to gather intelligence on geopolitical events and gain access to private documents and communications. To mitigate this, organizations are advised to update their DMARC policies to prevent such attacks.
Based on the meeting notes, the key takeaways are:
1. APT43, a North Korea-linked hacking group, is exploiting weak email DMARC policies to carry out spearphishing attacks.
2. The attacks are aimed at collecting intelligence on geopolitical events and foreign policy strategies of adversaries, particularly the United States, South Korea, and other countries of interest to North Korea.
3. The primary mission of the APT43 group, also known as Kimsuky, is to provide stolen data and geopolitical insight to the North Korean regime by compromising policy analysts and experts.
4. The agencies advise organizations to update their DMARC security policy to use “v=DMARC1; p=quarantine;” or “v=DMARC1; p=reject;” configurations to mitigate the threat.
5. It is also recommended for organizations to set other DMARC policy fields, such as ‘rua’ to receive aggregate reports about the DMARC results for email messages from the organization’s domain.