North Korean Hackers Linked to Massive $1.5 Billion ByBit Crypto Heist

 

Hackers thought to be working for the North Korean regime have successfully converted at least $300m (£232m) of their record-breaking $1.5bn crypto heist to unrecoverable funds.

The criminals, known as Lazarus Group, swiped the huge haul of digital tokens in a hack on crypto exchange ByBit two weeks ago.

Since then, it's been a cat-and-mouse game to track and block the hackers from successfully converting the crypto into usable cash.

Experts say the infamous hacking team is working nearly 24 hours a day - potentially funnelling the money into the regime's military development.

"Every minute matters for the hackers who are trying to confuse the money trail and they are extremely sophisticated in what they're doing," says Dr Tom Robinson, co-founder of crypto investigators Elliptic.

Out of all the criminal actors involved in crypto currency, North Korea is the best at laundering crypto, Dr Robinson says.

"I imagine they have an entire room of people doing this using automated tools and years of experience. We can also see from their activity that they only take a few hours break each day, possibly working in shifts to get the crypto turned into cash."

Elliptic's analysis tallies with ByBit, which says that 20% of the funds have now "gone dark", meaning it is unlikely to ever be recovered.

The US and allies accuse the North Koreans of carrying out dozens of hacks in recent years to fund the regime's military and nuclear development.

On 21 February the criminals hacked one of ByBit's suppliers to secretly alter the digital wallet address that 401,000 Ethereum crypto coins were being sent to.

ByBit thought it was transferring the funds to its own digital wallet, but instead sent it all to the hackers.