North Korea has long been accused of being a major state sponsor of cybercrime, and new research from the crypto firm Chainalysis puts an eye-watering figure on the scale of these thefts in 2025: it estimates that the regime's cybersquads plundered just over $2 billion of crypto and tokens.
Chainalysis puts this down as a 51% increase year-on-year for North Korea, and if accurate that would mean North Korea accounted for just under 60% of all global cryptocurrency theft, estimated at $3.4 billion in 2025. A major factor here was the February 2025 attack on Bybit, which the FBI attributed to North Korea, saying it made off with roughly $1.5 billion worth of digital assets.
