North Korea has hit back at a landmark US indictment of an alleged cyber operative earlier this month, branding it a “smear campaign” and the individual concerned a “non-entity.”
In a typically bellicose response to the US charges, a statement from Pyongyang’s foreign ministry on Friday claimed they amounted to little more than “vicious slander.”
“The act of cyber-crimes mentioned by the Justice Department has nothing to do with us. The US should seriously ponder over the negative consequences of circulating falsehoods and inciting antagonism against the DPRK that may affect the implementation of the joint statement adopted at the DPRK-US summit,” it reportedly noted.
“The US is totally mistaken if it seeks to gain anything from us through preposterous falsehoods and high-handedness.”
US investigators believe that Park Jin Hyok is a member of the infamous state-backed Lazarus Group responsible for WannaCry, and devastating attacks on Sony Pictures Entertainment, Bangladesh Bank and many more.
The indictment, filed on June 8 and made public at the start of the month, alleges he worked for a government front company known as Chosun Expo Joint Venture, or Korea Expo Joint Venture (KEJV), which operated out of Dalian, China.
The DoJ claimed Park and unnamed co-conspirators were given away via social media and email accounts used to send spear-phishing emails, their online aliases, accounts used to store stolen credentials, malware code libraries, proxy services and IP addresses linked to the attacks.
Park is charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit computer and wire fraud, but according to Pyongyang he is a “non-entity” — which could be interpreted to mean he doesn’t exist, or that he is a person of no importance.
A similar line was used by the Russian government in response to overwhelmingly incriminating UK intelligence and CCTV evidence of two men alleged to be responsible for attempting to assassinate a former Kremlin military man in Salisbury. The two men involved were paraded on Russian TV last week as innocent tourists.