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North Korea making billions from stolen cryptocurrency

• jongjong 3y ago
  That's fair enough. People are so dumb investing in these scam crypto projects and ignoring all the good, secure projects, I feel safer knowing that their money is now in North Korea's hands.
  • T-zex 3y ago
    Where should I find all the good, secure projects?
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
      Probably in North Korea. They have the best real-world tested security teams so they can be trusted with your money. Being from North Korea means you don't have to worry about all those western nanny-state regulations and oversight. Just buy their coins and become rich with zero risk...
    • ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
      In case this is an earnest question: the Lindy effect is your friend. Don't chase shiny new things. Stay away from new projects until they have a track record of 10 years or more. This simple rule would have saved people from Mt Gox, Luna, FTX, and every other fly-by-night disaster.
• fake-name 3y ago
  There's a reason a lot of people refer to buying cryptocurrency as funding the North Korea nuclear weapons research program.
• hulitu 3y ago
  > job offer was fake. North Korean hackers now had access to Sky Mavis's private keys Maybe Sky Mavis was too busy playing with cryptocurencies instead of implementing proper information security. /s But yeah, North Korea = bad, America = good.
  • pavlov 3y ago
    North Korea can be bad independent of any whataboutist dialectic games.
    • 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
      doesnt US hold like billions of dollars worth of bitcoin and other crypto that have been "siezed" over time? 'when' US sells these, wouldnt it be making a profit from stolen crypto?
      • puchatek 3y ago
        Are you talking about crypto assets seized from criminals? Because it should be obvious that that's completely different from a state-run worldwide hacking operation.
        • 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
          no. gains from holding on to assets as opposed to disposing off the siezed assets at market value at the spot.
      • omneity 3y ago
        There’s an argument to be made that asset seizure and hacking wallets are not quite the same thing.
        • Scoundreller 3y ago
          NK needs to pass some laws making crypto wallets outside of NK illegal. Then it can all be categorized under asset seizure.
          • romwell 3y ago
            >NK needs to pass some laws making crypto wallets outside of NK illegal. Then it can all be categorized under asset seizure. Sure, it would be seizure anywhere they have jurisdiction. Which isn't anywhere outside NK, rendering that point moot.
• bluelightning2k 3y ago
  Turns out there is a real world use case for crypto.
  • ddd_alice 3y ago
    making money disappear from balance sheets is another one, but it was the pandemic and the weak economy it caused
  • anuraaga 3y ago
    My running joke is that it would be awesome if Satoshi Nakamoto were North Korean and this was all planned from the start. I'd give it a 10% chance of being the case.
• macleginn 3y ago
  Tangentially, if you have to make money "from" stolen currency, it must be a strange kind of currency.
  • romwell 3y ago
    Crypto is a form of asset, not currency. We just use the wrong word for it.
    • lrvick 3y ago
      To you maybe. I regularly buy things with it.
      • schleck8 3y ago
        Can you disclose three of the types or products you buy with it without going to jail though?
        • lrvick 3y ago
          Assuming most people that use cryptoassets are criminals is not very nice. The media loves to talk about criminals using it, as though criminals do not use every other asset class as well. I buy all sorts of things. To name a few.... Cloud servers, VPN subscriptions, hardware security modules, random number generators, mechanical puzzles, anonymous donations to charities, payments to/ from friends for splitting checks at dinner, coffee from Backyard Coffee in Palo Alto, beer from a bar in Germany, a usb battery at a electronics store in Japan. Friend of mine even uses it to buy sex toys online with reasonably good privacy. Everything I have ever purchased with cryptoassets is legal and the same is true as far as I know of all the many friends I have that make regular use of them as well. Some of us actually believe in centralized finance without central government control, and others just like to buy things or move value around without fees or having their purchase history sold.
          • lrvick 3y ago
• GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
  No evidence is presented that North Korea was involved.
  • resolutebat 3y ago
    This is not new news, and the role of North Korean hackers in cybercrime is well documented. https://www.trmlabs.com/post/inside-north-koreas-crypto-heists https://www.trmlabs.com/post/inside-north-koreas-crypto-heis... https://go.chainalysis.com/rs/503-FAP-074/images/Crypto_Crime_Report_2023.pdf https://go.chainalysis.com/rs/503-FAP-074/images/Crypto_Crim...
    • GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
      No evidence is presented that North Korea was involved in these links either. BTW, 1 security vendor flagged this URL as malicious https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/731411888985ad777850f6896c25df1b0ce5b9a34505ef6b75d4089ed075d441?nocache=1 https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/731411888985ad777850f6896...
      • resolutebat 3y ago
        Seriously? They've been hacking for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Group
  • RandomLensman 3y ago
    What would you accept as evidence and would that be appropriate for general news?
  • thiagoharry 3y ago
    Most sources with news or accusations against North Korea do not have much evidence. For most countries, if hackers steal something, you do not assume as first hypothesis that their government was responsible. Just the usual psy ops and propaganda against a target identified as enemy. Of course, perhaps it is truth and they indeed use military funding to scam people and evade sanctions (which should not exist anyway in my opinion). If so, no conclusive evidence would exist anyway, this operation would have a plausible deniability that it was just talented individuals commiting crimes, not state operatives.
• wodenokoto 3y ago
  Since the ledgers are public, how difficult is it to black list individual bitcoins? E.g, have the feds do a public list of blacklisted coin ids and simply say that accepting these coins is against whatever compliance is necessary for a business to operate crypto in the USA and Europe. Then when some realestate agency is about to sell an apartment in Dubai for bitcoins they’re gonna be “no, not those. We can add them to our coin base” or whatever. I get that all countries that don’t care about the black list can continue trading, but those coins still have smaller demand and thus smaller value.
  • hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    anyone with the capability to deploy this would presumably have a conflict of interest due to the overall value dropping due to inability to use it as a crime currency.
  • posting_mess 3y ago
    I could be off, its been a while since ive been in crypto - take with a pinch of salt; Bitcoins dont really exist, they aren't a row with a "uuid" that we can just say "block bitcoin X". Its a ledger so you are worth the sum of transactions on the ledger against "wallet x" at any particular time. Blocks are really just "diffs" and if you sum those diffs you get to a "balance" that the network can verify and allow you to spend. So when you want to block "some bitcoins" you have to "follow the money", which will get you to wallet address. It's easy to block a single wallet address but the the criminals just split that one bitcoin into 10K addresses, now you have to follow that set of transactions and block 10K addresses. The implications / problem gets worse as you consider finical crimes like in the UK, gangs will transfer £1K/£2k to some young persons bank and ask them to with draw 90% of it. Should we permanently remove a young person from the network cause of 1 mistake? Should we force them to go through the risk of setting up a new address? Then of course the mixers / LN / complicated transaction tree's (blockchian hoping, ETC) - its a bit of nightmare. Its not unsolvable, but I cant imagine its an easy task by any metric.
  • capableweb 3y ago
    Bitcoins aren't individual. You just have addresses with an associated sum, once two different addresses send 1 Bitcoin each to that address, those are equal and if you send 1 Bitcoin from the address who just received it, it's not one of Bitcoins that was received that got sent, it's just two values being updated at the same time (sender's amount decremented, receivers amount incremented). What you can do, is blacklist specific addresses, and deny receiving/sending to anything that been "in contact" with that address. But you will for sure end up blocking more than you want with this approach, although that might not be a huge issue for the ones who are trying to block things.
• throwaway290 3y ago
  For more related, see the Lazarus Group (also discussed in an episode of Darknet Diaries featuring the guy who wrote the book about it: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/darknet-diaries/id1296350485?i=1000566274594 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/darknet-diaries/id1296...)
• TacticalCoder 3y ago
  NK is a country where there are still people eating roots and where they couldn't even photoshop properly a hoovercraft in a picture. WTF. Just seriously WTF. We're literally talking about a country where computer-savvy people cannot even photoshop a picture. I don't buy it that this country has the world's top hackers (no matter how often that it repeated by mainstream media) and I don't buy it that NK is thriving thanks to Bitcoin. What I do believe though is that North Korea is the ultimate boogeyman.
  • butterknife 3y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-14 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-14
  • capableweb 3y ago
    If had a bunch of badass hackers in my dictator-run country, and I want to try to exploit that fact for as long as possible, I'd probably make sure to give the impression that my country is so backwards we cannot even edit images correctly, so people give me the benefit of doubt.
    • makeitshine 3y ago
      That's pretty opposite of what most dictatorships do, though, right? Usually they want to seem to be more than they are. If it's originating from N. Korea it could be Chinese organized crime working through the country or it could be someone else entirely. It could be the CIA recouping loses from pot sales after legalization.
  • Larrikin 3y ago
    North Korea is a country that regularly test ICBM and nuclear bombs. But because of a crappy Photoshop those media reports are also fake? How many of the best hackers are also great at using Photoshop? Maybe kids in North Korea don't get to just dick around on the computer growing up and have their skills directed.
• capableweb 3y ago
  Viewed with another lens, North Korea has quickly become one of the biggest production penetration testers, with a focus on making the cryptocurrency industry safer by demonstrating how much security some exchanges are lacking. If these exchanges actually did their job and hired competent people, maybe they wouldn't frequently lose user's funds. All for the cost of ~$US1.65 billion per year. I wonder if this would be cheaper or more expensive than a high-profile security consultancy covering the same surface area.
  • user_7832 3y ago
    > All for the cost of ~$US1.65 billion per year. I wonder if this would be cheaper or more expensive than a high-profile security consultancy covering the same surface area. Depends on whether or not the consultancy is one of the big 3/4 lol
• AniseAbyss 3y ago
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• yashg 3y ago
  OK so they steal some Magic Internet Tokens, but how does that help pay the actual bills? You can't import oil or materials or microchips in exchange for Buttcoins. You will have to find a fool to give you real money in exchange of those tokens right? Even China and Russia won't accept funny-money in exchange of real goods. Sure, they will be able to sell some of those tokens on some exchanges to DCAing gamblers or laser-eyed folks like Saylor and Bukele, but that won't net them Billions. Also, the money will have to flow through some banking channels even if from some shady island nations. How do they actually liquidate the stolen tokens?
  • throwaway290 3y ago
    You mix and anonymize it all and cash in some part into actual money stored in friendly overseas banks like Macao. The rest is still useful for trade bypassing sanctions. You can't buy nuclear weapons or stuff to make nuclear weapons with a bank transaction because financial system is watching and bank mgmt doesn't want to be jailed but you still use magical tokens to barter for those goods direct.