North Korea ranks third in the world regarding bitcoin reserves after the United States and the United Kingdom. It managed to do this with the help of hackers who steal cryptocurrency during large-scale cyberattacks.
This was reported by the British newspaper The Times.
North Korea’s largest and most successful hacker group, Lazarus, has 13,580 bitcoins worth more than $1.1 billion.
According to Arkham Intelligence, a cryptocurrency monitoring organization that uses artificial intelligence to identify the owners of anonymous crypto holdings, Pyongyang is only behind London with $5 billion in bitcoins and Washington with at least $16.5 billion in bitcoins. Both the United Kingdom and the United States received their assets through criminal confiscation.
Lazarus, also known as TraderTraitor, is one of the most successful criminal organizations in the world. The proceeds of its activities are a lifeline for the Kim Jong-un regime in the DPRK and its source of foreign currency. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has confirmed that cybercriminals stole more than $1.5 billion in Ethereum during a digital raid on the Bybit crypto exchange in February.
The amount stolen is more than North Korea’s defense spending in 2023, which amounted to $1.4 billion.
Hackers attacked exchange users through fake emails (special phishing attacks). They fraudulently gained access to the exchange’s network and then changed the messages on users’ screens. This made people think that they were confirming normal transactions when, in fact, the hackers were gaining control over their transactions. The hackers agreed to transfer huge amounts of money through several anonymous accounts on decentralized exchanges.