The U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency has flagged a new Microsoft Windows vulnerability that North Korean cybercriminals are exploiting to compromise core parts of computer systems.

One expert told NK Pro that this “scary” development using what are known as operating system kernels could greatly increase the DPRK’s cyber espionage and warfare capabilities.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) stated in an alert published Monday that it added the CVE-2024-21338 kernel vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

CISA categorized it as a Windows exposed input/output control (IOCTL