North Korean government-linked hacker organization Lazarus Group stole $3 billion in cryptocurrency. The attackers managed to obtain this amount over the last 6 years of their activity.. This was reported by researchers from the cybersecurity company Recorded Future.
Report says criminal group stole $1.7 billion in digital assets in 2022 alone. These funds are allegedly used to finance local North Korean projects. This document does not indicate which specific companies and programs receive investments from stolen cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain data analysts at Chainalysis previously noted that $1.1 billion of the total amount stolen by the Lazarus Group was stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.. A September report published by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) highlighted the use of DeFi protocols by North Korean hackers.
The US Department of the Treasury recently introduced new sanctions against the activities of criminal cyber groups based in North Korea and their associates.. The organization added a number of companies to a special sanctions list of the Office of Foreign Assets Control. The Sindbad service was noted as being “involved in laundering cryptocurrencies stolen by the Lazarus Group.”
It is known that criminals used the services of the Sindbad mixer to hide the origin of cryptocurrency assets. Such tools confuse the traces of individual transactions, mixing transactions of several users at once.
Lazarus Group specializes in theft of funds not only in cryptocurrencies. It is known that in 2016, a criminal group hacked the system of the Central Bank of Bangladesh and stole $81 million. In 2018, they attacked the Japanese exchange Coincheck, stealing $530 million, and also attacked the Central Bank of Malaysia, stealing $390 million.