Apart from market malaise, crypto also facing a number of security risks

business-standard.com:

The world of crypto isn’t just suffering from a market malaise that has seen the price of Bitcoin drop from $69,000 to around $20,000 today — it also faces a troubling number of security risks.

There have been dozens of breaches in the past few years showing that cybercriminals are gravitating toward the world of cryptocurrencies. In many cases, we don’t know who the attackers are, but one culprit that keeps coming up is the band of state-backed hackers from North Korea known as the Lazarus Group.

According to a new book by Geoff White, “The Lazarus Heist,” the regime’s hackers have been become increasingly sophisticated over the past decade, managing to steal an estimated $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency to date. Crypto investors should expect the gang to continue exploiting blockchain targets, or the “the soft underbelly of the financial system,” according to White, who believes the $2 billion figure is a “vast underestimate.”

It stands to reason the hacker group would target crypto networks: Lazarus’s modus operandi for years has been to generate as much cash as it could to help prop up the North Korean regime and its nuclear weapons program. In the past decade, its schemes have included sophisticated ATM hacks and ransomware, including the infamous WannaCry cyber attack.

Now decentralized finance, or DeFi, has become a more lucrative target than banks, thanks to the billions of dollars locked up in its various applications. But the move-fast-and-break-things culture still prevalent in web3 development hasn’t helped the security of those networks. Neither does the fact that building web3 apps is unusually hard for programmers, who can create gaping financial vulnerabilities with simple coding errors.

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