South Korean police said Thursday that an investigation confirmed that hackers linked to North Korea’s military intelligence agency were responsible for a 2019 theft of Ethereum cryptocurrency worth 58 billion won ($41.5 million) at the time.
More than half of the stolen assets were laundered through three cryptocurrency exchanges set up by the hackers themselves, at a discount to bitcoin, and the rest were laundered through 51 exchanges different, said the National Police Agency.
Hackers infiltrated a cryptocurrency exchange where Ethereum was kept and stole 342,000 tokens, now worth more than 1.4 trillion won ($1 billion), said the police in a press release.
She did not give the name of the exchange, but the South Korea-based Upbit exchange said at the time that it had detected the transfer of 58 billion won from Ethereum to an unidentified wallet.
A National Police Agency official declined to confirm the identities of the hackers, but South Korean media said police identified them as the Lazarus and Andariel groups, linked to the North’s General Reconnaissance Bureau, affiliated with the army.
Police said their findings were based on an analysis of the Internet protocol addresses used and the resulting resource flows. The investigation was conducted in cooperation with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and is the first time that North Korea has been identified as the source of a cyberattack on a cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea, police said.
In May, a United Nations sanctions monitoring group said it suspected North Korea of staging 97 cyberattacks on cryptocurrency companies between 2017 and 2024, worth about $3.6 billion. of dollars.
Investigators traced 4.8 bitcoins to a Swiss cryptocurrency exchange and recovered them in October and returned them to the Seoul-based exchange, which is now estimated to be worth around $600 million. won, police said.
North Korea regularly denies any involvement in computer hacking or the theft of cryptocurrencies.
(1$ = 1,397.5400 won)
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