North Korea is again in the limelight, but not for good reasons. As per the reports from the UN Panel, the huge scale cyber-attacks, hacking incidents, and crypto exploitation have brought a huge amount of money to North Korea. As per some sources, a UN Nations panel has alleged that the country has ‘earned as much as 2 Billion U.S. Dollars’ through such activities. This report from the UN Nations panel has been prepared by a panel of individual experts who work for the organization.
The accusation further goes deeper and gets even more serious when the report accused the country to use this amount of money to fund its weapons. Today, Pyongyang fired two ‘short-range ballistic missiles. Also, the fourth missile launch is fixed in the next fourteen days.
The huge amount of 2 billion U.S. Dollars is claimed to be coming from hacking the crypto exchanges. It has been believed that this amount was stolen to escape from the hard process of getting international sanctions. According to some investigators, such activities point at the intention of the country to prepare for its nuclear weapons program. Earlier, the amount of funds ‘earned’ through such activities was anticipated to be much lower than 2 billion U.S. Dollars. Still, the amount is not surprising.
Since the past one year, the hacking activities of the country have been surfacing news quite frequently. It rather dates backs longer than just one year. For instance, according to reports published by Kaspersky Labs, which has been keeping a close eye on North Korea’s Lazarus for the past two years, revealed that the hacking scooped out around 81 million U.S. Dollars from a bank in Bangladesh back in 2017.
The same group from North Korea, last year in August, started to target crypto traders with new malicious software. The deceitful nature of such software was too lax the safety of the software, which allowed the hacker to steal money from backdoors, by remotely controlling the fund of the trader.
Lazarus didn’t stop there. Just within two months from the above hacking incident, the hacking mastermind group gave shape to five cyber and crypto attacks on crypto exchanges. These attacks were spread across the period of 2017 (February) to 2018 (September.) Based on these attacks, the hacking group roped in 571 million U.S. Dollars. This amount exceeded half of the total amount hacked by the fourteen crypto and cyberattacks that took place in the same period of time.
There have been other allegations on North Korea too. South Korea accused the country in question of hacking its computers for unauthorized crypto mining activities. Through these activities, it is anticipated that the attempt was to put Monero mining malware in the country’s computers, which pushed the hacked money towards North Korea.
Also, lately, in March, according to a UN panel, the country has gathered around 670 million U.S. Dollars in digital currency and fiat money. According to the UN panel, the virtual currencies-
provide the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with more ways to evade sanctions, given that they are harder to trace, can be laundered many times and are independent from government regulation.