North Korea ‘Funding Weapons Programs’ With Large Cache of ‘Stolen Crypto’
International investigators claim that North Korea stole “cryptoassets worth hundreds of millions of dollars” to pay for its nuclear weapons programs” – while uproar has erupted in South Korean political circles over politicians’ alleged ties to crypto developer Virgil Griffith.
The development comes as Pyongyang claimed recent missile launches were a “simulation” for nuclear strikes against South Korea. The North is set to conduct its first nuclear weapons test in five years in the coming days, according to a South Korean-US intelligence report. And all of this – say Seoul and Washington – is financed, at least in large part, by stolen crypto.
Per Yonhap, the UN Security Council’s North Korea Sanctions Committee has blamed North Korean hacking groups such as Lazarus for both the Ronin Bridge and Harmony hacks. The committee claimed the hacks had been directly authorized by Pyongyang’s General Reconnaissance Bureau.
The committee added that North Korean hackers, including Lazarus members, had “used social engineering hacking methods” to infiltrate systems and had preyed on individuals in an attempt to force a way in behind the bridge’s defenses.
The committee further claimed that the BlueNoroff hacking group – blamed by Western powers for the 2016 attack on Bangladesh’s central bank – had now been repurposed by the General Bureau of Reconnaissance to focus solely on stealing crypto.
And the committee argued that while it could not be certain whether BlueNoroff, like Lazarus, had “succeeded in generating illicit revenue for North Korea”, it said it was likely that “these types of operations” were likely to continue in the future .
North Korea’s ‘stolen’ crypto sparks political controversy
Per Digital Today, the issue of Nord and its alleged crypto-asset-related operations is at risk of creating an ugly political battle between the Democratic Party – the largest party in the National Assembly – and the People’s Power Party, which controls the executive branch. .
A Democratic member of parliament has claimed that Attorney General Han Dong-hoon visited the US District Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in July this year to investigate possible links between the Democrats and Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith. The developer was jailed for five years for trying to help Pyongyang evade sanctions by using crypto assets.
Some Democrats claim that People’s Power Party officials are trying to engineer a connection between Lee Jae-myung, the Democratic Party chairman, and Griffith. According to court documents, Griffith appears to have had a contact in South Korea. Politicians have argued that this contact may have been linked to Lee and Park Won-soon – a leading member of the Democratic Party and the former mayor of Seoul. Park committed suicide on June 9, 2020.
Allegedly, documents indicate that both Lee and Park were “very interested in setting up an Ethereum server research center in North Korea.”
He did not directly address the accusation when questioned about the matter, stating that it was “right to cooperate with the United States” on crypto-related matters, but asserted that he was not at liberty to “disclose specific details” about the nature of his visit to the United States.
