North Korea Stole Billions Worth Of Cryptocurrency, Says South Korea

South Korean officials warned on Monday that North Korea managed to successfully steal large amounts of cryptocurrency from South Korea through efforts to hack cryptocurrency exchanges, Reuters reported.

Kim Byung-kee, a member of South Korea’s parliamentary intelligence committee, said North Korea stole cryptocurrency worth billions of South Korean Won (millions in U.S. dollars) over the course of the last year.

“North Korea sent emails that could hack into cryptocurrency exchanges and their customers’ private information and stole (cryptocurrency) worth billions of won,” Kim said.

The intelligence committee member did not provide additional details including actual amount of cryptocurrency stolen, which exchanges were targeted and breached, or if victims of the hacking efforts were alerted to the breach or of North Korea’s involvement.

According to Kim, South Korea’s intelligence agencies operate under the assumption that North Korea is continuously attempting to penetrate the defenses of the cryptocurrency exchanges in order to steal valuable digital coins.

Kim’s warnings were not the first acknowledgement of North Korea’s attempts to interfere with the operations of South Korean exchanges. Late last year, South Korean investigators began looking into North Korea’s involvement in hacks that have targeted the cryptocurrency exchange Youbit, based in Seoul. The attacks have reportedly been ongoing since April 2017.

North Korea has shown increasing interest in cryptocurrency over the last year, likely as a result of a number of factors including the sudden rise of value of many of the cryptocurrencies as well as new economic sanctions that have made it difficult for the isolated nation to generate revenue.

Earlier this year, it was reported that North Korean hackers launched a number of campaigns that aimed to hijack computers and use them to mine for cryptocurrencies.

The effort, led by a hacking group within the country known as Andariel, reportedly took control of a server belonging a South Korean company in the summer of 2017 and used it to mine for Monero, a popular cryptocurrency that boasts privacy features that make it nearly impossible to trace the origins of transactions.

Security researchers also discovered malicious code that forced an infected machine to mine for cryptocurrency. The attack was linked directly to North Korea, as the code mining for the cryptocurrency contained a direct link to Kim Il Sung University—a college in North Korea’s capital city.

North Korea was also pinpointed as the likely culprit of the WannaCry ransomware attack that affected more than one million machines globally in 2017. The attack demanded a ransom of Bitcoin be paid in order to unlock files that the malicious software encrypted and made inaccessible.