Although the ongoing market crash is not at all good for investors, they might see a silver lining in millions of losses are also there for North Korea
Many reports have come out depicting the value loss and price drops of the crypto market and crypto assets respectively. But this report might not sting much, although it brings bad news for North Korea this time. Apparently, North Korea is among the top countries involved in crypto crimes, where more than fifteen incidents of cyber theft are documented and found their strings with the authoritarian regime country. These thefts overall equated to about $1.59 billion worth of stolen funds.
But before North Korean cyber thieves could have enjoyed this threat, the recent crypto market downturn has already reduced a significant amount from the stolen crypto assets fund. As it’s a known fact that the recent crypto crash started in the month of May has by now wiped out funds worth hundreds of billions of dollars. This is due to most crypto assets including major cryptocurrencies dropping by more than 70% from their all time high.
This fall in cryptocurrency value resulted in a significant loss of North American hackers who had stolen billions of dollars worth of crypto funds. As per the reports, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has employed about 7,000 full-time hackers and given them tasks to execute ransomware, crypto protocol hacks, and cyberattacks in order to raise funds out of these illicit activities.
North Korea has a bad name when it comes to crypto related hacks and stealing of crypto assets; one such popular incident was the Ronin bridge attack. In April this year, Ronin Bridge of popular play-to-earn NFT game, Axie Infinity got hacked and that ended up losing $600 million worth of digital assets. This massive amount of stealing funds incident had also got linked to North Korea since the infamous ransomware group named Lazarus belonged to the country.
From the calculation given the drop in value of stolen Ether (ETH) after the market crash, it has plunged to about $230 million with a massive reduction of 60%. As per the reports of crypto and blockchain data aggregator, Chainalysis, North Korea had somewhere around $170 million in the form of unlaundered crypto assets collected from about 49 hacks in nearly four years. This whole crypto asset value has just dropped to $63 million as per the reports.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/07/01/the-crypto-market-downturn-turned-out-to-be-a-loss-of-millions-even-for-north-korea/