Biggest theft in history: FBI accuses North Korea of Bybit coup
Last week, Bybit crypto assets worth 1.5 billion US dollars were stolen. Now the FBI has also accused a notorious group from North Korea.
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With the FBI, a US government agency, is now officially accusing North Korea of being responsible for the biggest crypto theft of all time. The isolated regime is responsible for the theft of virtual assets worth around 1.5 billion US dollars from the service provider, the US federal police have now declared. The FBI calls this particular form of cybercrime “TraderTraitor”, while the group responsible is publicly known as Lazarus or APT38. The gang moves quickly and is already in the process of converting the loot into Bitcoin to eventually change it into a standard currency. The FBI has called on the industry to block this money laundering.
Not just the biggest crypto coup
The billion-dollar coup became known on Friday and was made public by the CEO of the Dubai-based crypto exchange himself. The thieves, now located in North Korea, had apparently managed to deceive Bybit during a routine transaction so that the funds, mainly in the form of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, were sent to an unknown address instead of the company's own wallet. The North Korean Lazarus Group was suspected immediately afterward. The FBI has now compiled a number of Ethereum addresses linked to the theft and whose transactions the various players in the industry are supposed to prevent.
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“The Bybit hack was a highly sophisticated attack that employed multiple tactics, techniques, and procedures consistent with the signature of other DPRK operations,” the analytics firm Chainalysis explained earlier this week. According to their blockchain analysis, the perpetrators moved the stolen assets via numerous intermediate addresses. Instant exchange services that do not identify their customers were also used. However, a significant proportion of the cryptocurrencies initially remained unused. This is a well-known strategy; the Lazarus Group often waits “weeks or months” before moving the money on.
North Korea has thus not only succeeded in pulling off the biggest crypto coup of all time, it has also eclipsed the biggest non-digital bank robbery, writes dpa: in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein personally enriched himself with a large part of the national currency reserve of the Iraqi central bank. A few hours before the start of the US-led invasion, Hussein unlawfully ordered the withdrawal of 920 million US dollars in cash in a handwritten note. His son supervised the operation, during which the money was loaded into three trucks. While some of the money was later rediscovered, around 350 million dollars is still missing today.
(mho)
