North Korea has swiped more than $6 billion in cryptocurrency over the past decade—a sum so large that no one else compares, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. The country’s hackers are both patient and brazen, according to investigators. To get into companies’ computers, they comb through employees’ Facebook and Instagram pages and invent tailor-made stories to trick them into clicking on links with viruses. Some North Korean hackers have even become employees themselves, fooling U.S. companies into hiring them as remote IT workers and gaining access to their networks.

On the night of Feb. 21, Ben Zhou, the chief executive of the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, logged on to his computer to approve what appeared to be a routine transaction. His company was moving a large amount of Ether, a popular digital currency, from one account to another. Thirty minutes later, Mr. Zhou got a call from Bybit’s chief financial officer. In a trembling voice, the executive told Mr. Zhou that their system had been hacked, according to a New York Times analysis. “All of the Ethereum is gone,” he said. When Mr.

A major Cambodian payments firm received crypto worth over $150,000 from a digital wallet used by North Korean hacking outfit Lazarus, blockchain data shows, a glimpse of how the criminal collective has laundered funds in Southeast Asia, Reuters reported. Huione Pay, which is based in Phnom Penh and offers currency exchange, payments and remittance services, received the crypto between June 2023 and February this year, according to the previously unreported blockchain data reviewed by Reuters.

Blockchain researchers say North Korea-linked hackers are likely behind a $70 million theft from crypto exchange CoinEx, Reuters reported. CoinEx, which says it is based in Hong Kong, said on Tuesday on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that wallets used to store the exchange's crypto assets had been hacked. It said on Friday it estimates its losses at $70 million, which it said is a "small portion" of its total assets.

The United States on Monday imposed sanctions on virtual currency mixer Tornado Cash, accusing it of helping hackers, including from North Korea, to launder proceeds from their cyber crimes, Reuters reported. A senior Treasury Department official said that Tornado Cash, one of the largest mixers identified as problematic by the Treasury, has reportedly laundered more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency since it was created in 2019.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday announced the indictment of two Europeans for allegedly conspiring with a recently sentenced American cryptocurrency researcher to help North Korea evade U.S. sanctions, Reuters reported. Alejandro Cao de Benos of Spain, who founded a pro-Pyongyang affinity organization, and Christopher Emms of Britain, a cryptocurrency businessman, were accused of recruiting the researcher Virgil Griffith to illegally provide cryptocurrency and blockchain technology services to North Korea. Both defendants are at large.

Once seen as an opportunity for investors to position themselves for a future North Korean turnaround, the country's rarely traded defaulted debt may move further into the twilight zone after new sanctions were imposed this week on Pyongyang, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Debt from North Korea - probably the most isolated of the frontier markets - has already been frozen for years as the secretive nation faces the most stringent sanctions regime in the world.

South Korean companies operating at a joint industrial estate in North Korea have said they face bankruptcy in many cases because of icy cross-border relations, Agence France-Presse reported. In a joint statement they demanded that the South Korean government improve ties with the North so that the Kaesong estate can run normally. The factory bosses also demanded that the communist North withdraw "unilateral and unacceptable" wage and rent demands, ease restrictions on border crossings and guarantee the safety of South Koreans working there.