Is not a novelty that a part of the “extraoficial” incomes of North Korea come from their hacker’s army activities. The group known as Group Lazarus is on the point of view by the main governments and security companies from all over the world. What begins to be more notorious however, is the amount of money that the country is amassing using all kind of cyber attacks.
As told in a summary from the United Nations, in the last months North Korea would have obtained no less than 2000 millions of dollars derived from their cyber attacks to banks and bet houses ine xchange of cryptocoins.
As the UN confirms in the summary, besides stealing all kind of foreign currencies, the attacks that make to Exchange of cryptocoins have the objective of whiten the money that Pyongyang obtains on illegal ways by other means. As the document also explains, the major part of the funds that are obtained as result of this activity, have the purpose of finance “ Reconnaissance General Bureau” that is, the secret activities that do their secret services.
As the experts of the UN explain, in these months at least 35 financial institutions of 17 countries have reported attacks that have their origin in North Korea. Besides, there’s the danger that the attacks have against the exchange house of cryptocoins, because it makes easier that the asian country “generate incomes in a harder detecting way, abided to a less supervision and regulation by the different governements”.
By other hand, the summary asks why it keeps allowing that hunderds of IT professionals and software developers of North Korea keep working nowdays for any kind of foreign companies (including both asian and european), when it was already shown that in most cases they use their position to install malwares in all kind of organisations, specially cryptojackers that would be used in a massive way to mine the bitcoin and other coins.
It’s not the first time that the UN warns about this kind of operations. An earlier report, dated last March, warned that the north korean hackers had stolen between january 2017 and september 2018, 571 millions of dollars in at least five exchanges of viartual coins. To this quantity is added another 670 millions of dollars from other “cyber activities”.