New Report: North Korea's Cyber Army Allegedly Stole $3 Billion in Crypto to Fund Nuclear Program
North Korea's cyber army has stolen $3 billion in cryptocurrencies, with 50% of the funds being used to fund the country’s ballistic missile program.
According to a recent analysis by The Wall Street Journal, state-sponsored hackers from North Korea have netted more than $3 billion from crypto thefts over the past five years.
The stolen funds have been supplying roughly half of North Korea's ballistic missile program, with defense accounting for a significant portion of the country's expenditure.
The report noted that North Korean hacking groups account for a huge portion of illicit cyber activities, as well as some of the biggest crypto heists ever.
For one, the North Korean Lazarus group of hackers is believed to be behind the hack of Axie Infinity's Ronin blockchain, which saw hackers make off with about $625 million worth of Ethereum and USDC in one of the largest crypto hacks of all time.
“When you look at the amount of funds stolen, [it] would look like an existential threat to what you are building," Aleksander Larsen, chief operating officer at Sky Mavis, told the WSJ.
The gaming company lost the funds after North Korean hackers reached out as a recruiter to an engineer.
A Trojan Horse, a malicious computer code software that gave hackers access to Sky Mavis and its customers, was implanted onto the engineer's computer, which was then used to gain access to private keys required for validating transactions.
The big crypto thefts even caught the attention of the US government, which intensified its focus on countering such attacks.
In April, the US Treasury revealed that North Korean hackers and scammers exploit loopholes in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space to launder money and hide criminal activity.
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