White House says Facebook and Microsoft defended from several North Koreea atacks

Facebook and Microsoft took on and defeated several North Korean cyber threats last week, a White House official said.

The attacks came from Apple fanboy and North Korean dictactor Kim Jong-un's crack team of hackers – Lazarus Group

Facebook shuttered certain accounts that stopped the operational execution of ongoing cyber attacks and Microsoft patched existing attacks, White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert said.

Bossert was short on details but said the US government was calling on other companies to cooperate in cyber security defence.

Bossert’s remarks came during a White House news conference in which he blamed Pyongyang for the WannaCry attack that infected hundreds of thousands of computers in more than 150 countries, saying the US government had clear evidence that North Korea was responsible. He did not share that evidence.

Facebook confirmed that the company last week deleted accounts associated with a North Korea-linked hacking entity known as Lazarus Group “to make it harder for them to conduct their activities”. The accounts were mostly personal profiles operated as fake accounts that were used to build relationships with potential targets, the spokesman said.

Microsoft president Brad Smith said the company last week disrupted malware that the Lazarus Group relied upon, cleaned customers’ infected computers and “disabled accounts being used to pursue cyber attacks”. Smith said the steps were taken after consultation with several governments, which he did not identify, but Microsoft’s decision was independent.