This Russian hacker claims he was behind WannaCry, not North Korea

Russian media reports that a hacker from the city of Ekaterinburg claims he was the one who developed WannaCry together with some other unspecified hackers. His name is Konstantin Kozlovskiy, and he was arrested in connection with the Lurk virus, which stole over 1 million Russian rubles. Now he tells his group was those Russian hackers everybody talked about throughout this year. The interview he gave to the local outlets even contains claims he intentionally left his traces in the DNC internal network, which might prove he was behind this.

As for WannaCry, he told he was responsible for the interface of the virus, or, as he called, it, “its muzzle”. Interestingly enough, the United States intelligence agencies would not agree with these claims: they, as well as private cybersecurity firms, believe it was Kim Jong-un’s government-backed hackers who did this. Kozlovskiy also states he cooperated with the Russian authorities which recruited him after he was caught red-handed years ago. However, the representatives of the Russian security services vehemently rejected this.

The WannaCry virus was one of the most infamous examples how cryptocurrency and its anonymization benefits can be used for malevolent purposes. Hackers demanded ransom in bitcoins, which at that time cost much lower than today, and after some time converted all ransom money into Monero, which has even better anonymization means than Bitcoin.