North Korea Becomes World’s Third Bitcoin Holder

North Korea has become the world’s third-largest Bitcoin holder after the United States and Great Britain, the Times newspaper writes, citing analysts at Arkham Intelligence. Pyongyang was helped to achieve this status by a cyberattack on the Bybit cryptocurrency exchange, which resulted in the largest theft in history, amounting to $1.4 billion.

Image source: Micha Brändli / unsplash.com

The Lazarus hacker group, considered the largest and most successful in the DPRK, currently holds a total of 13,580 bitcoins worth $1.152 billion, according to analysts. The largest country holding bitcoins is the United States, with $16.5 billion in assets; the United Kingdom is second with $5.07 billion in assets. Both governments claim to have seized these assets from the criminals.

Lazarus, also known as TraderTraitor, may be the world’s most successful criminal group, having been blamed by US authorities for stealing funds in the cryptocurrency Ethereum from Bybit. The hackers are believed to have achieved their goal by using email phishing attacks to trick users of the crypto exchange into granting access to their networks. The attackers then rigged the screens displayed to users to make them believe they were approving legitimate transactions. In reality, they were approving the transfer of huge sums of money through multiple anonymous accounts using decentralized exchanges. Despite Bybit’s attempts to reverse the transactions, most of the cryptocurrency was transferred into other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, and fiat (traditional) currencies.

Last year, hackers from the DPRK allegedly stole $800.1 million in cryptocurrency; in total, $2.21 billion in digital funds were stolen worldwide during this period. North Korean cybercriminals are also believed to be responsible for a major theft from the central bank of Bangladesh. Up to 40% of Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs are financed by “illicit cyber funds,” UN experts calculated last year.