North Korea has been play up performing out major cryptocurrency hacks to bypass economic sanctions, according to a United Nations (U.N.) Security Council expert panel probe.
Nikkei Asian Review, which has obtained the report, reported Friday that this is the first time the panel has particularized North Korea’s illicit cryptocurrency activities.
The country has had severe economic sanctions imposed over its nuclear and brickbat programs, which have impacted its exports of coal and thus its foreign exchange earnings, according to Nikkei.
Cryptocurrencies, the panel put, give the regime “more ways to evade sanctions, given that they are harder to trace, can be laundered profuse times and are independent from government regulation.” It also suspects that North Korea is using blockchain technology to shun being tracked.
The panel estimates that North Korea carried out successful attacks on Asian cryptocurrency reciprocities at least five times between January 2017 and September 2018, with losses totaling $571 million.
The nonetheless figure was also reported by cybersecurity vendor Group-IB last October, which attributed the losses to North Korea’s bad hacking group, Lazarus. The group managed to steal the cryptocurrencies through 14 hacks on crypto exchanges, the sturdy said.
In February 2018, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) also attributed the theft of tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies in 2017 to North Korean hackers.
The panel put forwarded that UN member states “enhance their ability to facilitate robust information exchange on the cyberattacks by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with other managements and with their own financial institutions,” to identify and prevent such attacks.
The report will soon to be formally submitted to the Collateral Council, Nikkei said.
North Korea image via Shutterstock