The ransomware hack might be linked to north korea

A researcher at Google announced Monday that he had identified some common code in the Wanna Cry ransomware and hacking tools used by the Lazarus Group. The Lazarus Group is believed to be connected to North Korea and was involved in the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures.
Another clue that Wanna Cry was the work of a government: It contained a killswitch in the form of a hidden Url that, once registered, stopped the ransomware from spreading. Jazz wrote about the cyber researcher at Kryptos Logic who discovered the Url yesterday. Ars Technica notes, “Such ‘killswitches’ are highly unusual for malware developed by financially motivated criminal groups. By contrast, they’re much more common in malware written by nation-sponsored hackers.”
In addition to the Sony Pictures hack, the Lazarus Group has been implicated in the theft of $81 million dollars from Bangladesh’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year. The theft actually attempted to take nearly a billion dollars but most of the transactions were canceled after an alert banker noticed a typo.