UN Says North Korea Stole Record Amount of Crypto in 2022

The United Nations says North Korea stole a record amount of cryptocurrency assets last year.

As Reuters reported Tuesday (Feb. 7), a confidential UN report says that North Korea targeted the networks of foreign aerospace and defense companies.

The report claims North Korea used “increasingly sophisticated cyber techniques both to gain access to digital networks involved in cyber finance, and to steal information of potential value, including to its weapons programmes.”

The report — compiled by independent sanctions monitors — points to estimates from South Korea that hackers linked to its neighboring country stole $630 million in crypto last year, while a cybersecurity company put the figure at north of $1 billion.

That’s in keeping with findings from blockchain data firm Chainalysis earlier this month, which issued a report on crypto hacking that says North Korean hackers stole $1.7 billion last year.

“The variation in USD value of cryptocurrency in recent months is likely to have affected these estimates, but both show that 2022 was a record-breaking year for DPRK (North Korea) virtual asset theft,” the U.N. report said.

Reuters said the report is set to be made public later this month.

“The crypto industry has historically suffered from the perception that its anonymous and decentralized technical architecture provides a haven for money laundering and other illicit activities around the globe,” PYMNTS wrote last week after Chainalysis released its findings.

The company’s report says that hackers stole $3.8 billion from crypto companies in 2022, the  biggest year in the crypto sector’s decade-plus history for losses tied to hacks.

Last year’s crypto losses were up from the $3.3 billion lost to hackers in 2021 and $500 million in 2020 and 2019, Chainalysis found.

Hacking reportedly “ebbed and flowed” throughout the year, with March and October of 2022 seeing the biggest spikes in crypto cybercrime activity, the report said. In October alone, there were 32 individual cyberattacks, in which an astonishing $775.7 million was stolen.

In early November, cryptocurrency exchange FTX suffered its now-infamous implosion. And although the company’s downfall was due to the alleged criminal activity of its founder, it has also attributed some of the shortfall in its books to more than $400 million lost to hackers.

In contrast to FTX, which while in solvent operation functioned as a centralized cryptocurrency trading platform, decentralized financial (DeFi) protocols and platforms saw the largest breaches for the year — representing 82.1% of pilfered crypto assets, or a whopping $3.1 billion, the Chainalysis study found.

This was compared to 73.3% in 2021, with 64% of the losses suffered by DeFi actors coming from cross-chain bridge protocols specifically, the report said.

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