The Lazarus hacker group has raked in 1.5 billion USD in a year, and AI has made phishing attacks harder to defend against.

In the latest annual threat report released by South Korean security company AhnLab, a name has been repeatedly mentioned—Lazarus. This North Korean-backed Hacker group has almost monopolized major security incidents in the encryption field over the past year.

Their tactics are actually not new: disguising as invitations for industry seminars or job interview notifications, these seemingly legitimate emails lure you into clicking on attachments or links. Once you fall for it, the consequences are often severe. The incident in February this year where a leading exchange was robbed of 1.4 billion dollars? Reports point to Lazarus as the prime suspect. Recently, a certain platform in South Korea lost 30 million dollars, and the investigation is also pointing in their direction.

AhnLab's advice is quite practical: businesses shouldn't rely on single-point defenses to hold up; they need to build a multi-layered protection system—don't slack on security audits, apply patches as needed, and keep up with employee training. As for individual users? Enable multi-factor authentication, avoid clicking on unfamiliar links, share less personal information, and only download software from official channels.

What's more troublesome is that AI tools can now be used by anyone. In the past, phishing emails could be identified by spelling mistakes and grammatical issues, but now emails generated by AI, fake pages, and deepfake videos are difficult to distinguish between real and fake. What does this mean? In the future, such attacks will only become more hidden and harder to defend against. The string of security must always be tightened.