The "Olympic Destroyer" computer virus used to attack last month's Pyeongchang Winter Games was embedded with forged code to make investigators believe the attack was done by hackers linked to North Korea, Russia's Kaspersky Lab reported Thursday.
Discovery of the effort to insert a fake digital fingerprint in the Olympic Destroyer virus underscores the emerging threat of hackers using false flags to incriminate innocent parties or undermine confidence in information provided by security researchers.
"Attribution is not just difficult, it's getting impossible," Kaspersky researcher Vitaly Kamluk told reporters on the sidelines of the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit, which is being held in Cancun, Mexico. "If it continues this way, you will see industry making a lot of mistakes and people will lose trust."