US probes North Korean link to Fed cyber theft after similar breach of Sony
Los Angeles/Washington — The US is investigating whether the theft of $81m from a Bangladesh central bank account at the New York Fed is linked to North Korea, because of the similarity of the hack to an earlier breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment, two people familiar with the matter said. There was no indication that charges would be filed soon, said one of the people, both of whom asked not to be identified because the matter was not public. Some cyber-security experts have concluded 2016’s theft from the Bangladesh central bank’s account was done with some of the same hacking tools used in the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures, the maker of the movie The Interview, which poked fun at North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. The Sony hack, linked to North Korea by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was followed that year by a blackout of North Korea’s internet that a US legislator said was retaliation, without saying who was responsible for the outage. FBI spokesperson in Los Angel...
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