North Korean cyberwarfare assaults on the cryptocurrency trade are rising in sophistication and within the variety of teams concerned in such felony exercise, crypto agency Paradigm warns in report titled “Demystifying the North Korean Risk.”
North Korea-originated cyberattacks vary from assaults on exchanges and social engineering makes an attempt to phishing assaults and sophisticated provide chain hijacks, the report says. In some instances, the assaults take a 12 months to play out, with North Korean operatives biding their time.
The United Nations estimates that between 2017 and 2023, North Korean hackers have netted the nation $3 billion. The full haul has skyrocketed in 2024 and this 12 months, with profitable assaults towards crypto exchanges WazirX and Bybit, which collectively netted attackers round $1.7 billion.
Paradigm writes that the North Korean organizations orchestrating these assaults quantity no less than 5: Lazarus Group, Spinout, AppleJeus, Harmful Password, and TraitorTrader. There’s additionally a coalition of North Korean operatives who pose as IT staff, infiltrating tech firms world wide.
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Excessive-profile assaults and predictable laundering strategies
Lazarus Group, probably the most well-known North Korean hacking staff, is given credit score for a number of the most high-profile cyberattacks since 2016. Based on Paradigm, the group hacked Sony and the Financial institution of Bangladesh in 2016 and helped orchestrate the WannaCry 2.0 ransomware assault in 2017.
It has additionally taken goal on the cryptocurrency trade, generally to nice impact. In 2017, the group hit two crypto exchanges — Youbit and Bithumb. In 2022, Lazarus Group exploited the Ronin Bridge, leading to a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands in misplaced property. And in 2025, it infamously stole $1.5 billion from Bybit, sending shock all through the crypto neighborhood. The group could also be behind some Solana memecoin scams.
As Chainalysis and different organizations have defined, Lazarus Group additionally has predictable cash laundering strategies after securing a haul. It breaks up the stolen quantity into smaller and smaller items, sending them to numerous different wallets. It then swaps the extra illiquid cash for these with larger liquidity and converts a lot of it to Bitcoin (BTC). After that, the group might sit on the stolen cash for a protracted time period till the eye from regulation enforcement dies down.
The FBI has up to now recognized three alleged members of the Lazarus Group, accusing them of cybercrimes. In February 2021, the US Justice Division indicted two of these members for involvement in international cybercrimes.
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