UN says North Korea stole $630m of crypto last year in lowball estimate

According to a Feb. 6 Reuters story, the United Nations (UN) revealed in a classified assessment that North Korea stole $630 million in cryptocurrency last year.

The UN emphasized that their estimate is significantly lower than a competing estimate released last week by Chainalysis. According to Chainalysis, the country stole $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency in 2022, accounting for little less than half of the entire theft of $3.8 billion.

The UN stated that the disparity between the two figures could be attributed to fluctuations in the dollar worth of stolen cryptocurrencies. Despite the fact that its own estimate is roughly three times lower than Chainalysis', the UN admitted that 2022 was a record-breaking year for North Korean bitcoin theft by any account.

The UN also stated that North Korea targeted global aerospace and defense industries, as well as their networks, in order to steal knowledge. North Korea used ransomware to extort payments from those in possession of that information.

The report's publicized sections do not specifically mention that the payments were made in cryptocurrencies. However, because almost all ransomware accepts Bitcoin payments, North Korean attackers were almost probably compensated in bitcoin.

Apart from ransomware, North Korean organisations have been linked to a number of crypto-related incidents, including attacks on the Harmony Protocol, Ronin Bridge, and individual Japanese crypto businesses. Furthermore, the alleged usage of the Tornado Cash currency mixer by North Korea was one of the reasons the protocol was sanctioned by the US Treasury in August 2022.

Long-term reports issued in December by a South Korean agency also revealed that North Korean hackers stole $1.2 billion since 2017.

The UN findings will be made public in the following months.

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