The nosedive in cryptocurrency markets has wiped out millions of dollars in funds stolen by North Korean hackers, digital investigators say, threatening a key source of funding for the sanctions-stricken country and its weapons programmes.
One of North Korea’s cryptocurrency caches from a 2021 heist, which had been worth tens of millions of dollars, has lost 80% to 85% of its value in the last few weeks and is now worth less than $10 million, said Nick Carlsen, an analyst with TRM Labs, another U.S.-based blockchain analysis firm. Carlsen told Reuters that the interconnected price movements of different assets involved in the hack made it difficult to estimate how much North Korea managed to keep from that heist.
Chainalysis and TRM Labs use publicly available blockchain data to trace transactions and identify potential crimes. Such work has been cited by sanctions monitors, and according to public contracting records, both firms work with U.S. government agencies, including the IRS, FBI and DEA. One estimate from the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons says North Korea spends about $640 million per year on its nuclear arsenal. The country’s gross domestic product was estimated in 2020 to be around $27.4 billion, according to South Korea’s central bank.
The CNAS report found that North Korean hackers exhibit only “moderate” concern over hiding their role, compared to many other attackers. That allows investigators to sometimes follow digital trails and attribute attacks to North Korea, though rarely in time to recover the stolen funds. The sheer size of recent hacks has strained North Korea’s capacity to convert cryptocurrency to cash as quickly as in the past, Carlsen said. That means some funds have been stuck even as their value drops.
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