The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has claimed that hacker group Lazarus Group is responsible for stealing $41 million from cryptocurrency sports betting platform Stake.
“These same DPRK individuals are also responsible for several other high-profile international virtual currency heists,” the FBI said.
The FBI has listed the addresses of dozens of digital wallets that allegedly hold stolen digital funds. According to the FBI, Lazarus Group transferred cryptocurrency through the Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain networks.
Lazarus hackers have stolen more than $200 million this year, including $60 million in cryptocurrency from payment companies Alphapo and CoinsPaid in July and about $100 million in digital assets from Atomic Wallet in June, according to the bureau.
Hacking Stake
Earlier this week, hackers broke into the gaming platform Stake. Due to the security breach of the crypto platform, $41 million worth of cryptocurrency ended up in the hands of fraudsters.
During the first transaction, the fraudsters withdrew USDT Stablecoin worth about $3.9 million The next two transactions withdrew 6001 Ether (ETH) worth about $9.8 million. The attacker continued to withdraw tokens worth $1 million in USDC, Dai (DAI) and Stake Classic (STAKE).
Smart contract auditor Beosin said other networks including BNB Smart Chain (BSC) and Polygon were also affected by the attack. Another $7.8 million was lost to Polygon and $17.8 million to BSC, bringing the total loss to more than $41 million, according to the Beosin team.
How much did North Korea steal
According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Pyongyang has stolen more than $3 billion through various schemes in the cryptocurrency market. At the same time, in 2022 alone, North Korea launched about forty successful attacks on the crypto market.
North Korean hackers used the stolen money to finance the military machine. However, the case is not limited to cryptocurrency hacks alone. According to the State Department’s calculations, Pyongyang flushed about $4 billion in 2019 to finance its nuclear program. This amounted to nearly a third of North Korea’s entire economy.