Cryptocurrency hackers help North Korea develop nuclear weapons

International investigators claim that North Korea has «stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in digital assets» to develop a nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, in South Korean political circles, politicians are accused of having ties to Virgil Griffith, a former Ethereum developer. Griffith is currently in an American prison, the developer was convicted of helping North Korea evade sanctions.

Official Pyongyang claims that the latest missile launch, which caused a strong international response, is a «simulation» of a possible future attack on South Korea. Although the launch did not include a test use of nuclear weapons, North Korea is on track to conduct its first nuclear test within the next five years. According to South Korean and U.S. intelligence reports, the project is already being funded by stolen cryptocurrencies.

The largest North Korean news agency Yonhap and the UN Security Council’s North Korea Sanctions Committee accused the Lazarus hacker group of attacking the Harmony and Ronin Bridge networks. The hacks were successful and brought the attackers hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. Most likely, these funds are used by the Korean dictatorship for its developments. The sanctions committee said that such attacks are likely to continue in the future.

Earlier, we reported that the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group has started hunting for MacOS users looking for work in the crypto sector. The hackers created fake job ads on the Singaporean cryptocurrency exchange Crypto. com. They sent messages about fake job postings with supposedly real links to people who had posted their resumes to find work. If a user showed interest and opened the fraudulent link, hackers infected his or her computer.

And yesterday it became known about an application that steals cryptocurrency from Solana owners. The hackers posed as the developers of the Phantom digital wallet, sent fake NFTs to users and manipulatively forced them to perform a certain algorithm of actions, after which users lost their funds.