North Korean hackers have allegedly stolen billions of pounds of crypto to fund their ballistic missile programme.
The dictatorship is said to be training criminals to impersonate tech workers and employers as apart of their sophisticated schemes that has seen them rake in a reported $3billion (£2.4billion).
The Wall Street Journal reported the story of an engineer from a blockchain gaming company who thought he was about to walk into a new better paid job, after a recruiter contacted him via LinkedIn.
But what followed was a part of a vast North Korean operation that saw a document, claiming to be a part of the interview process, forwarded to them.
But it was actually a malicious bit of computer code that when opened, allowed the hackers access his computer.
It then allowed hackers to break into the company he worked for, Sky Mavis, and make off with more than $600million (£477million).
The American outlet reported that this was the country’s biggest heist, and a part of a longer pattern that saw them hacking and robbing their way to funding about half of the dictatorship's ballistic missile programme.
The WSJ quoted Anne Neuberger, President Biden’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, as saying: “The real surge in the last year has been against central crypto infrastructure around the world that hold large sums, like Sky Mavis, leading to more large-scale heists.”
The first large-scale crypto attacks were believed to have begun around 2018 and according to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies there were over 40 successful attacks in just 2022 alone.
An increase in testing of missiles by Kim Jong Un’s regime has occurred across the same period as an uptick in the crypto thefts.
It was claimed that North Korea has built a secret workforce of thousands of people around the world to help with its heists.
They will pretend to be IT or tech workers, and sometimes conduct interviews luring their targets in with job offers as they pretend to be employers.
They also allegedly use Western “front people” to get themselves hired for crypto companies, using these people, who were described as actors, to get access to the companies before leveraging their internal position.
A United Nations report into the state hacking programme found that the regime generate significant revenue using it and that it was a “low-risk, high-reward” strategy that was difficult to detect.
Ms Neiberger was further quoted as saying: “Most nation-state cyber programs are focused on espionage or attack capabilities for traditional geopolitical purposes. The North Koreans are focused on theft, on hard currency to get around the rigour of international sanctions.”
Erin Plante, the vice president of investigations with Chainalysis was also reported as saying: “They were really early into crypto, and they were some of the most advanced users of crypto early on.”
This led to a first-of-its-kind hack attack earlier this year where North Korean linked hackers hit a number of firms using a cascading supply attack.
They broke into software makers one at a time, having hacked into a software company before a corrupted version of their product was downloaded by another company, allowing them access both.
