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North Korea’s top leaders appear to be stepping up efforts to mine cryptocurrency as a way to evade international sanctions, according to a new report
State sponsored crypto crime: The report by Recorded Future, a US firm that analyzes cyber security threats, details the Kim Jong-un regime’s efforts to use cybercrime and cryptocurrency to circumvent sanctions intended to curb the nuclear weapons program of the nation. The United Nations recently estimated that North Korea stole up to $ 2 billion using “widespread and increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks” on financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges. Both the UN and Recorded Future had previously reported that in addition to stealing cryptocurrency, the regime had also started mining it. The new report adds further details on the mining effort and suggests that North Korea is expanding this particular operation.
A constant accumulation: In July 2017, Recorded Future released one of the first reports suggesting that the North Korean government was mining Bitcoin. A year later, the company noted that North Korea’s interest in and use of cryptocurrencies had “exploded”. In addition to successfully carrying out a series of South Korean cryptocurrency exchange robberies, the regime had begun mining a privacy-oriented currency called Monero. Unlike Bitcoin, whose public transaction log allows you to track money flows, Monero uses cryptography to hide transaction information from public view and make the money flow very difficult to track. The authors of the new report say North Korea’s Monero mining efforts appear to have increased tenfold since 2018.
A “precious tool”: Considering this development and the country’s successful exchange hacks and other cryptocurrency-related thefts, the authors conclude that “cryptocurrencies are a valuable tool for North Korea as an independent and unregulated source of revenue generation, but also as a means to move and use illegally obtained funds. “
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