A NORTH Korean hacking group accused of orchestrating the largest heist in crypto’s history have stolen a whopping £5billon worth of digital money from the West.
The shady Lazarus Group are said to be behind some of the most damaging crypto scams – and the stolen money is reporedtly used to fund Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme
Hackers gain control of crypto wallets and rip all the digital money[/caption]
The group of high-profile, extremely skilled hackers have developed what experts describe as a powerful and sophisticated system that can breach security layers and steal money.
After ripping digital money, they then launder it through thousands of blockchain transactions to make the proceedings untraceable.
A major chunk of the amount, if not all of it, reportedly funds Kim Jong-un‘s cash-starved regime, which has been hit by many sanctions over the years.
In 2022, a UN investigation found that cyberattacks are an “important revenue source” for Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme,
In its biggest crypto heist of all time, the Lazarus Group gained control of an Ethereum wallet and nicked all of its digital assets – stunning the world of blockchain.
Dubai-based Bybit exchange, the victim of the heist, confirmed the record-breaking crypto theft and said they lost £1.2billion.
Fraudsters were able to access the £1billion wallet and transfer the contents to an unidentified address.
Bybit, founded in 2018, holds a staggering £15billion in assets and offers users various cryptocurrencies.
This £1billion attack caused the value of Ethereum to drop by about four per cent.
Ben Zhou, the CEO of Bybit, shared a statement on X after the costly incident.
He said: “Bybit is solvent even if this hack loss is not recovered, all of the client assets are 1 to 1 backed, and we can cover the loss.”
The CEO described this crime as “the worst hack in history”.
It is also most certainly the biggest known theft of any kind, the previous being Saddam Hussein stealing a whopping £800million during the 2003 Iraq war (£2billion post inflation).
North Korea also stole an estimated $800 million in crypto back in 2024, according to Redbord.
In 2022, it stole an estimated $1.7 billion in crypto, according to threat intelligence platform Recorded Future.
Other major cryptocurrency attacks in the past have seen hundreds of millions of pounds taken from people’s online wallets.
A whopping £32million worth of Bitcoin was stolen from a Binance exchange in 2019.
The platform said hackers ran off with over 7,000 bitcoins and carried out a “large-scale security breach”.
Thieves also stole £210million in crypto from the exchange site Mt Gox, in 2014.
The digital money was stolen because of a loophole in the website’s security.
Fake North Korean IT workers infiltrating UK companies
By Sayan Bose, Foreign News Reporter
SECRET spies from North Korea posing as freelance IT workers are plaguing UK companies to earn cash for Kim Jong-un’s sanction-hit regime.
Many firms are at risk of being targeted by fraudulent North Koreans who are actively applying to secure jobs on freelance work platforms.
A report by the HM Treasury’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementations (OFSI) has warned that IT workers from North Korea are using tactics that include “aliases, false or fraudulent personae and proxies, to mask their true identities and hide links to the regime”.
Over the years, Britain has hit North Korea with a slew of financial sanctions including the freezing of funds and economic resources.
These actions are aimed at countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missiles, the HM Treasury says.
Kim Jong-un‘s cash-starved regime has long been known to deploy cyberb tactics to steal sensitive information from nations in the West.
But highly-trained workers are now posing a greater threat of getting into the payroll of British companies as remote workers.
The unique cyber tactic is allowing millions of dollars to flow into a reclusive country like North Korea, only to aid its ballistic missile program against the West.
And it also threatens to wreak havoc in the form of cyber attacks.
According to the advisory from HM’s Treasury, IT workers from North Korea provide potential employers in the UK with fake CVs in a bid to secure employment.
Many such fraudsters often use bot farms run by middlemen inside a particular country who use remote desktop software that allows workers from North Korea to log in to a company’s internal servers – making it look like they are working from inside the country.
Others have been leveraging the latest AI techniques to impersonate foreign nationals and steal their entire identity.
Affected UK sectors include:
- Information Technology (IT)
- Electronic Money Institution (EMI)
- Money Service Business (MSB)
- Professional Services
- Cryptocurrency
Bangkok, Thailand – 1 July 2021: Cryptocurrency on Binance trading app, Bitcoin BTC with altcoin digital coin crypto currency, BNB, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Cardano, defi p2p decentralized fintech market[/caption]
