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Hackers stole billions in crypto to keep North Korea’s regime afloat
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoWhat we were promised: Crypto currencies would liberate journalists and dissidents What we got: pedos, terrorists, and hostile countries got rich
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoIn fairness, NK is not rich - perhaps slightly less poor...
- aaomidi 2y ago[flagged]
- seanw444 2y agoSo... the same balance of good and evil present in literally every technology?
- Bostonian 2y agohttps://archive.is/1vkXG https://archive.is/1vkXG
- josefritzishere 2y agoAs a currency... crypto just seems worse and worse. There is no FDIC for crypto.So this is just gone.
- LinuxBender 2y agoWhat's worse, it's just a repeat of the 1920's as described here [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU [video][8 mins][cnn interview]
- Kapura 2y agoWhen i look around at all the positive innovations cryptocurrency has failed to deliver, it really does seem like they invented a currency exclusively useful for doing crimes.
- MrMcCall 2y agoAnd how much money was made off of companies that were created to support cryptocurrencies? Does anyone around here know of any? Bueller?
- Pixelbrick 2y agoDirty money for dirty deeds...
- madcow2011 2y agoand these dirty deeds weren't even done dirt cheap!
- af78 2y agoThis is the opinion of Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman too, in his post Crypto is for Criming https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/crypto-is-for-criming https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/crypto-is-for-criming.
- dist-epoch 2y agoNobel Prize winner Paul Krugman famously estimated in 1998 that the impact of the Internet on the economy will be no more than that of the fax machine.
- af78 2y agoThat's fair. Making predictions is risky business, economist or not. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
- 2y ago
- horacemorace 2y agoIf cryptocurrencies are self-regulating, aren’t the techniques used by these hackers actually the best and most effective way to play the game by its own rules? Calling this behavior “cheating” smells of sore-loserism.
- kelsey978126 2y ago[flagged]
- _1 2y agoWhat does this sentence even mean?
- erikerikson 2y agoIt is a reference to Magic The Gathering. Blue decks are known for wildly changing the rules of the game. Black decks are known for interacting with death and the graveyard which is where cards go after they are used. A paraphrasing of the GP without using magic terminology is to say that they are playing by the rules in an unexpected way using unexpected combinations and sequences. More briefly "playing by the rules as written".
- acc_297 2y agoThere is a certain Bitcoin evangelist who will preach the gospel of a self governing currency that via a system of rules will automatically validate transactions between trust-less parties in a decentralized manner over a globe-spanning internet protocol but then complain when that same system does not prevent them from accidentally sending the entire contents of their "wallet" to an address in North Korea. The system does not represent ownership the system only tracks of the validity of transactions and if the North Korean government proposes a valid transaction of your BTC or ETH to an address they control and a mining-node includes that transaction in a block which a majority of the network accepts then those assets are no longer yours they belong to North Korea. The properties of the crypto-asset ecosystem which allow it to be ungoverned also make it ungovernable.
- blakesterz 2y agoApparently the title of this story changed at The WSJ. That word "Cheat" seems wrong, while the old title makes more sense. "How Hackers Stole Billions in Crypto to Keep North Korea’s Regime Afloat" The archive link from the @Bostonian comment below has the original I guess: https://archive.is/1vkXG https://archive.is/1vkXG
- dang 2y agoOK, we've put that in the title above. Thanks!
- ForHackernews 2y agoKim Jong Un's keys: Kim Jong Un's coins. Blockchain is a perfect, transparent trustless global ledger that can't be hacked, so it's a misnomer to characterise these transactions as "cheating", "crimes" or "theft".
- cvoss 2y agoIf you unlawfully or immorally gain access to information, such as my private keys, and then use that information to move money, you have absolutely committed a crime, cheated, and/or stolen from me. If you deceive me into executing a transaction voluntarily by misrepresenting the destination (which is immoral and often illegal), you have absolutely committed a crime, cheated, and/or stolen from me.
- cmurf 2y agoDon't crypto advocates claim it needs nothing at all from government? What's the basis of unlawful? What contract is controlling these concepts and their adjudication?
- dwater 2y agoWhat laws are a North Korean subject to that they have broken? Who decides when a transaction was cheating or stealing without a central authority and enforcer?
- cvoss 2y agoMoral laws and natural law, and moral people in a candid world. It's the same principle by which one people accuses another, over which they have no jurisdiction, of crimes against humanity or war crimes or of violating Nature's Laws. See the US Declaration of Independence for a short treatise on this topic.
- tgv 2y agoTo add to the other comments: do you really have a right to whatever it is that the bits unlocked by that key represent? Who granted you that? AFAICT, it's the systems running the blockchain that grants you that, and it's not governed by any contract outside the blockchain.
- benrutter 2y agoTangential recommendation, but anyone interested in North Korean hacking should check our the BBC World Service's Lazarus Heist podcast[0]. 0. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9/episodes/downloads https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9/episodes/downloads
- os2warpman 2y agoCheated? From an outsider's perspective their methods seem typical.
- TheBlight 2y agoSuper skeptical of all hacking attribution claims made by MSM.
- MyOutfitIsVague 2y agoWho is MSM?
- pasquinelli 2y ago[M]ain[S]tream [M]edia
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- stepupmakeup 2y agoI've been skeptical ever since they were trying to claim the xz backdoor was from a state actor. All it took was 3 sockpuppet accounts, a lot of time and actual code contributions, something literally anybody with a computer science degree can do. Name: Jia Tan? Must be a CCP agent, never mind the fact that anybody can make their name and timezones anything...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chasing 2y agoI thought this was one of crypto's primary use cases? A kind of "anything goes, anything you can get away with is allowed" sort of approach.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoSure, in the same way that a primary use case of cash is that somebody can punch you in the face and take your money and whatever you can get away with is allowed.
- chasing 2y agoThe primary use of cash is to buy goods and services. That's not the primary use of crypto. The primary use of crypto, as far as I can tell, is to try to make money appear out of thin air whether via speculation or fraud. And, admittedly, to occasionally buy JPGs.
- rchaud 2y ago> Hackers then send the ether to “mixers”—crypto platforms that co-mingle tokens from various users, obscuring their ownership. After that, the ether is swapped for bitcoin and then converted into tether, a token whose value is linked to the U.S. dollar. Good timing for the US to lift sanctions on Tornado Cash [0]. Too many people think "lock them up" is the solution to crime, without considering that crime relies on certain types of infrastructure to remain in business. And that people who are "tough on crime" often have good reasons to keep operational the things that facilitate said crimes. [0] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0057 https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0057
- yieldcrv 2y agoadding sanctions to a smart contract address that cannot appeal itself was not a winning position in the US courts and determing that a smart contract deployment was a "foreign asset" was also not a winning position in the US courts, as its not clear if it was deployed on a node outside of the US to begin with, or if the person that actually sent the deployment transaction was a non-US citizen The Treasury with its new head just short circuited that challenge and stopped wasting taxpayer money on this yeah, stick with prosecuting the actual crime instead of the laziest approach of calling everyone a criminal for using a sanctioned smart contract
- NelsonMinar 2y agoNorth Korea launders its stolen cryptocurrency through every available means. Including Tornado Cash, quite aggressively, which is why they were sanctioned. It is very hard to understand why the Trump administration would reverse those sanctions unless they are trying to aid this kind of money laundering.
- mhluongo 2y agoBecause code had never been sanctioned before, and it's a clear freedom of speech issue?
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
- IncreasePosts 2y agoIt's pretty incredible that a sizable percentage of North Korea's GDP derives from crypto theft. Actually about the same percentage as Spain was pulling from the Americas at the end of the colonial period.
- benlivengood 2y agoSatoshi identified!
- rsanek 2y agoFor others wondering, it's about 2%: 2023's GDP was $29.6b, and this article mentions that the $6b was "over a decade."
- whatever1 2y agoThis is the only promise that cryptocurrency held. Avoid government barriers. So we should celebrate the fact that it was not a complete scam.
- earnesti 2y agoIt held also the promise of making me very, very rich.
- dylan604 2y agoHow'd that work out?
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI disagree. There's a tremendous amount of waste in the economy related to reconciling different companies' records of who owes what to whom and then getting that info to the bank and then hearing back from the bank about whether the debt was fully or partially paid and then relating that to whether the service continues to be rendered. Moving from an accounts-receivable/accounts-payable model to a insert-coin-receive-service model would be a huge advantage. It just hasn't happened because the vibes are wrong and it appears that they'll stay wrong for a while.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- woleium 2y agoi agree smart contracts are the way forward, but you don’t need crypto or blockchain to implement them. You do need a trusted third party, to adjudicate when things go wrong.
- breakyerself 2y agoWe already have that. It's called courts.
- smallstepforman 2y agoExtraordinary claims with no way to verify, typical for WSJ. Now the question is which group benefits from policies aimed to combat this? Follow the money to see who misleads you …
- lern_too_spel 2y agoWho benefits from policies aimed to combat this? Western society.
- logicchains 2y agoNobody in western society benefits from KYC laws, they make life hard for small business and destroy financial privacy while the big players get away with a slap on the wrist. There's absolutely zero empirical evidence of KYC leading to a reduction in the rate of any kind of crime.
- lern_too_spel 2y ago> There's absolutely zero empirical evidence of KYC leading to a reduction in the rate of any kind of crime. We are discussing an article about a crime that KYC trivially solves.
- bjornsing 2y agoBefore there was crypto North Korea stole 1000 Volvo cars from Sweden. They simply ordered them and never payed.
- abidhusain 2y agoThe issue of cybersecurity in crypto is becoming more critical by the day. The scale at which nation-state actors are targeting the crypto world shows just how vulnerable many systems still are.
- starwin1159 2y agoWhy are North Korean hackers so skilled? Are their technical skills top-tier?
- micah94 2y agoThey work for a government that can help with the threats, bribery and social engineering required to get access to employees of exchanges.
- OutOfHere 2y agoSomething tells me that WazirX's cold wallet wasn't actually cold - it was multisig but hot. The only thing that leaves the hardware running a cold wallet is a signed transaction that is limited in scope to the signed amount and recipient.
- ForOldHack 2y agoWe should return the favor.
- wayne707 2y ago[dead]
- csense 2y ago"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" The original point of Bitcoin was that someone else didn't keep custody of your money for you. You'd keep custody of it yourself, on your computer or a paper wallet. Yet, there are tons of people who keep obscene amounts of Bitcoins on crypto exchanges or otherwise held by companies for them. Why do people buy a cryptocurrency built on distrust of institutions that hold your money for you, and then give that cryptocurrency to an institution to hold it for them? Did nobody learn anything when the former Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange imploded in 2013-2014?
- TEYANA 2y ago[dead]
- TEYANA 2y ago[dead]