About 89% of This Year's Crypto Hacking Losses Estimated to Be Linked to North Korea

Approximately 89 percent of the total cryptocurrency hacking damages worldwide this year are estimated to have been committed by North Korea, according to an analysis.

Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis stated that the proportion of hacking damages linked to North Korea, which stood at 15 percent in 2021, has surged to 89 percent this year.

The average damage per hacking incident estimated to have been committed by North Korea also increased significantly, rising from about 67 billion KRW in 2021 to approximately 248 billion KRW this year.

In particular, Chainalysis estimated that the massive 8.5 trillion KRW hacking incident targeting Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, which occurred on the 29th, was also the work of North Korea.

Marking the largest-scale theft in cryptocurrency history, the firm pointed to the North Korea-linked hacking group "TraderTraitors" as the mastermind behind the attack.

This group is known to have previously attacked cryptocurrency exchanges such as Bitget.

Chainalysis stated that it discovered circumstances where the funds hacked from Binance were mixed and moved with funds stolen from Bitget last month, presenting this as grounds for estimating the attack to be North Korea's doing.

The stolen funds moved across numerous digital wallets through thousands of transactions, which was analyzed as a tactic to make tracking the funds difficult.

Chainalysis reported that the cumulative global cryptocurrency hacking losses from 2021 through the end of October this year reached approximately 30 trillion KRW.

Among these, damages linked to North Korea amounted to about 18 trillion KRW, accounting for 59 percent of the total.

Reported by Choi Jae-yeong | Video by Na Hong-hee | Graphics by Lee Jeong-ju | Produced by SBS Digital News
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.