The FBI claims that hackers with ties to North Korea committed one of the biggest cryptocurrency thefts in history, stealing almost $1.5 billion worth of Ethereum from a company in Dubai.
A group of hackers known to the U.S. government as TraderTraitor and the Lazarus Group were involved in another crime earlier this month that targeted Bybit, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.
According to the FBI, the hackers steal cryptocurrency “by disseminating cryptocurrency trading applications that were altered to contain malware that facilitates cryptocurrency theft.”
The FBI stated in a late-Wednesday web PSA that it thought the hackers, who were supported by North Korea, were “in charge of the theft.”
In its announcement, the FBI stated that “TraderTraitor actors are moving quickly and have converted some of the stolen assets to Bitcoin and other virtual assets scattered across thousands of addresses on multiple blockchains.” “Fiat currency conversion and additional money laundering are anticipated for these assets.”
The FBI accusation and the heist have not been confirmed by North Korean state media. An Associated Press request for comment was not immediately answered by Pyongyang’s delegation to the UN in Geneva.
However, South Korea’s spy agency estimates that during the last five years, North Korea has performed $1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency theft and other virtual assets. In the face of severe U.N. sanctions and North Korea’s stringent border controls during the coronavirus outbreak, it represents a unique source of desperately needed foreign currency to support its frail economy and finance its nuclear development.
Separately, a panel of U.N. specialists stated that it was looking into 58 alleged cyberattacks by North Korea from 2017 to 2023, in which almost $3 billion was taken and “allegedly used to fund the country’s development of weapons of mass destruction.”
In a post on the social media site X, Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou responded the FBI’s statement by directing readers to a website that offers $140 million in rewards for hunting down the stolen cryptocurrency and causing other exchanges to freeze it.
According to Bybit, an attacker “manipulated” a regular transfer of Ethereum, one of the most well-known cryptocurrencies, from a so-called “cold” or offline wallet by moving the funds to an unnamed address. The heist has been referred to as “the largest breach” in the history of blockchain transactions by the blockchain analytics company Certik.
Although the election of U.S. President Donald Trump has given the industry a boost, investors have been alarmed by the attack, which has caused a recent decline in total cryptocurrency prices. Bitcoin, the market leader, dropped from a peak of over $100,000 a month ago to trading around $82,000 on Thursday.
