Over the past five years, North Korea has been able to steal $721 million from Japan worth cryptocurrency through hacker groups as reported by the Nikkei business daily. Elliptic states that a total of $2.3 billion in cryptocurrency has been stolen from businesses by North Korea in the last half a decade.
Right after North Korea tested out missiles into the sea, a group of spies and American investigators had gathered at an intelligence service in South Korea. This team was directed to eventually stop transactions of the stolen cryptocurrency money that was to be channelled into accounts and converted into hard cash to fund North Korea’s illegal missile program. The South Korean National Intelligence Service together with private investigators at Chainalysis has confirmed a New York blockchain tracking firm that has offered a path to cryptocurrency espionage.
Lazarus
North Korea’s affiliated hackers, the Lazarus group has been noted to be dangerous as it has managed to steal $1.7 billion worth of crypto in the last year alone through multiple attacks.It has also been recognized that North Korea is not just stealing from cryptocurrency firms but also from crypto thieves. According to experts, the family of Kim Jong that has ruled over the past seventy years has used state owned companies to enrich the family and manage their regime.
Ironically, through the crypto heist, North Korea is still experiencing a famine that has been deemed the country to be at its worst since the 1990s where a certain famine caused mass starvation, killing thousands of people. The UN FAO has recognized that even before the covid pandemic, most north koreans were undernourished and the lockdown only exacerbated the situation. Despite all this, they have found new methods to fund their arsenal by selling narcotics as well as committing insurance fraud.
The government in North Korea should have its citizens as their first priority by coming up with solutions towards food insecurity.