See? It totally works!
Per Chainalysis, North Korea had quite the year with cryptocurrency in 2021. Or at least, their hackers (which are practically synonymous with the state, natch) did; according to reports, they made off with around $400 million in digital assets over the course of last year.
The bulk of their gains, according to the report, were in Etherium; significant, as it’s the first time Etherium has beaten out Bitcoin in their haul. Ether stood proudly at 58%, while Bitcoin got the silver medal at 20%. the remaining 22% was a mixture of ERC-20 tokens and altcoins.
As for what they’re doing with it? Well, typically, it gets laundered into other cryptocurrencies, then cashed out into some form of normal currency that you can actually spend somewhere on Earth.
Once North Korea gained custody of the funds, they began a careful laundering process to cover up and cash out.
These complex tactics and techniques have led many security researchers to characterize cyber actors for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) as advanced persistent threats (APTs). This is especially true for APT 38, also known as “Lazarus Group,” which is led by DPRK’s primary intelligence agency, the US- and UN-sanctioned Reconnaissance General Bureau. While we will refer to the attackers as North Korean-linked hackers more generally, many of these attacks were likely carried out by the Lazarus Group in particular.
Before you get worried about your crypto wallet, though, you should probably know that, for the most part, North Korean hackers seem to prefer targeting investment firms and exchanges. The margins are overall higher, and it’s less of a hassle than figuring out which individual wallets have anything worth stealing.
Coincidentally, there’s a reason its believed that the government-funded Lazarus Group is involved. You might remember the hullabaloo around the Seth Rogen/James Franco film The Interview. As it was about to come out, Sony Pictures was hacked. That was a hack purportedly perpetrated by the same Lazarus Group, acting to keep the film from coming out.
As for that money laundering, well, it’s slow going. Despite the fact that most people tend to conflate NFTs with Money laundering, they’d be a poor choice, due to the fact that money laundering doesn’t work that way (and really, come on, Breaking Bad had an excellent layman’s explanation of money laundering, stop getting this wrong).
Regardless, it’s currently estimate that of the ~$400 million in cryptocurrency North Korea stole in 2021, these hackers are still sitting on about $170 million in unlaundered money. Which Chainalysis believes points to a concerted effort by the country to engage in cryptotheft.
These behaviors, put together, paint a portrait of a nation that supports cryptocurrency-enabled crime on a massive scale. Systematic and sophisticated, North Korea’s government—be it through the Lazarus Group or its other criminal syndicates—has cemented itself as an advanced persistent threat to the cryptocurrency industry in 2021.
Source: PC Gamer
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