North Korea Continues Bitcoin Hacking Activities
I really don’t understand the whole bitcoin trend, but obviously the North Koreans do because they continue to hack and make money from it:
South Korea’s spy agency suspects North Korea might be involved in recent hacking incidents related to cryptocurrency, according to sources on Saturday.
The National Intelligence Service (NIS) is said to have secured evidence that the North was involved in stealing the personal information of some 30,000 people from Bithumb, the country’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, back in June, as well as robbing virtual money at another exchange Coinis in September.
The NIS reportedly confirmed that the same code used by Lazarus, a group accused of being behind the 2014 Sony hack, was used in the previous two cases.
The evidence is said to have been passed to the prosecution for further investigation. The Supreme Prosecutors’ Office has been handling the former case, while the latter is being taken care of by local police. [Yonhap]
Silly question. If the prosecutors build a case against various North Koreans, what will that matter? Will they try to extradite folks from the Dperk? Or will tbey just spend tax dollars?
The core bitcoin transaction technology is secure, as far as all experts can tell. The weaknesses are at the currency exchanges. There, access to members’ accounts are through standard computers relying on arbitrary computer security tools and techniques. These have flaws.
BTW, millions, maybe billions of dollars have been digitally stolen from institutional banks too. North Korea had targeted banks with weak security infrastructure to steal through the SWIFT banking network.