Nigeria has been named among 18 countries, whose banks have been attacked by North Korean hackers to get funds for sponsoring its nuclear programme.
Cyber security firm, Kaspersky, made this shocking revelation in its latest report.
According to the report, this could be regarded as the biggest bank compromise in history.
The huge amounts of stolen money North Korea pilfers is likely being spent on advancing its development of nuclear weapons, two international security experts told CNN.
“This is all for their nuclear weapons and missile programmes. They need this money for building and researching more ballistic missiles,” said Anthony Ruggiero, a senior fellow for Foundation for Defence of Democracies who specialises in North Korea.
The company’s report, which it presented this week at a cyber security conference in the Caribbean, claims it found evidence of the same hacking operation launching attacks on financial institutions in Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Gabon, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Poland, Taiwan, Thailand, and Uruguay.
Recall that as at October last year, Nigerian banks lost over N8 billion to electronic fraud within two years.
Data provided by the Nigeria Electronic Fraud Forum (NeFF) show that there was a spike in phishing attacks, email scams and spam messages targeting corporate bodies, individuals, financial institutions and banks’ customers across the country.
According to the statistics, these cyber attacks have hiked by 635 per cent from 1,461 in 2014 to 10,743 in 2015.
Few days ago, the United States issued last warning over North Korea’s continued launch of ballistic missiles that threaten the country and its allies-Japan and South Korea.