North Korea to invest stolen $2.0bn from crypto hacks on WMD programme

Experts at the UN said North Korean cyber agents had illegally raised an estimated $2.0bn to invest in the country’s development of weapon programs.

In a new report compiled for the Security Council, the experts said that North Korea was using cyberspace “to launch increasingly sophisticated attacks to steal funds from financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges to generate income” in violation of sanctions.

Recent hacks of cryptocurrency exchanges involved crypto-currencies including bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple.

According to the report, seen on Monday by The Associated Press, some of those large-scale attacks against cryptocurrency exchanges by North Korea had allowed the country “to generate income in ways that are harder to trace and subject to less government oversight and regulation than the traditional banking sector.”

North Korea also continued to have access to the global financial system, “through bank representatives and networks operating worldwide” as a result of UN member states's “deficiencies” in implementing financial sanctions and Pyongyang’s “deceptive practices,” the experts said.

Those relationships were allowing North Korean financial institutions to maintain control over bank accounts and to facilitate transactions including illicit transfers of coal and petroleum.

Banks and their representatives “make use of complicit foreign nationals to obfuscate their activities,” the report alleged.

The experts also said that representatives from three North Korean entities under UN sanctions were continuing to operate overseas, “attempting to transfer conventional weapons and expertise and to procure equipment and technology for the country’s WMD (weapons of mass destruction) programs.”