North Korea appears to have orchestrated the world's biggest robbery, according to the FBI, in what is another worrying sign of the hermit kingdom's growing prowess in cybercrime.
On 21 February a "notorious group of hackers" achieved what could be "their magnum opus", said The Independent. In just minutes they stole $1.5 billion from one of the world's most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, Bybit. That's more than the largest known bank theft of all time, when Saddam Hussein stole $1 billion from Iraq's central bank on the eve of the 2003 war.
Investigators have pointed the figure at The Lazarus Group, one of the world's "most sophisticated hacking operations". The group, allegedly "backed by North Korea since its inception in 2009", caused "worldwide chaos" in 2017 with the global WannaCry ransomware attacks, which infected 200,000 computers, including NHS systems. But this would be its "largest strike to date", equivalent to North Korea's annual defence budget.
In the past Pyongyang "relied on its elite hacking cadres to conduct espionage or steal trade secrets", said The Telegraph. But increasingly, leader Kim Jong Un is using these hackers as "a weapon of economic warfare" to "bolster the coffers" of a regime battered by sanctions and the Covid-19 pandemic. And the "virtually unregulated" cryptocurrency industry is a "haven" for these criminal enterprises.
Last year hackers linked to North Korea stole more than $1.3 billion in cryptocurrency – a "dramatic jump" from the $660 stolen in 2023, reported The Guardian, and about 61% of the $2.2 billion stolen globally. The proceeds of these "audacious thefts" are believed to have funded the regime's nuclear weapon and missile programmes. | 
