How North Korea pulled off the biggest heist in history

Just after 2pm last Friday, a notorious group of hackers – responsible for some of the worst cybercrimes of the 21st century – pulled off what may well be their magnum opus. open image in gallery The Lazarus Group, operating out of North Korea, is believed to be behind the theft of $1.46 billion of cryptocurrency from the leading exchange Bybit Crypto investigation firm Chainalysis noted that the Bybit hack followed a common playbook used by Lazarus, which involves a social engineering attack to initially compromise the funds. open image in gallery Funds stolen by the Lazarus Group have reportedly been used to fund North Korea’s ballistic missile programme “Hackers likely used malware to secretly modify what users saw on the Safe interface. This meant users couldn’t see what they were actually approving, making it easy for hackers to trick them.” Within two hours of the Bybit theft, researchers from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic observed stolen funds being sent to 50 different wallets, each holding approximately 10,000 ETH. “North Korea’s Lazarus Group is the most sophisticated and well-resourced launderer of cryptoassets in existence, continually adapting its techniques to evade identification and seizure of stolen assets,” Elliptic noted in a blog post.