Elliptic analysis reveals that North Korea-linked hackers have reportedly stolen over $2 billion in crypto-assets so far this year, which is said to be the largest annual total on record, with around 3 months still to go before 2025 comes to an end. But to put all this into perspective, the overall crypto market cap has swelled to more than $4 trillion so the rate of theft may have increased proportionally as well.
Nevertheless, it still seems problematic that this now brings the cumulative known value of crypto-assets stolen by the regime to over $6 billion.
According to the UN and various other international government agencies, these funds are believed to play “a critical role in financing North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile development programs.” It’s also quite challenging to obtain further details about the so-called rogue state due to its highly secretive nature and being closed off from the rest of the world for the most part.
Concerningly, the actual figure may be even higher, according to the comprehensive update.
Attributing cyber thefts to North Korea is not an exact science, the report clarified.
As explained in the report, Elliptic and other experts use a combination of blockchain analytics, “observed laundering patterns, and intelligence sources to make an attribution.”
The blockchain intelligence firm added:
“We are aware of many other thefts that share some of the hallmarks of North Korea-linked activity but lack sufficient evidence to be definitively attributed. Other thefts are likely unreported and remain unknown.”
This year’s losses are said to be driven in large part by February’s $1.46 billion theft from digital currency exchange Bybit.
And other thefts publicly attributed to North Korea this year include those suffered by LND.fi, WOO X and Seedify. Elliptic added in its latest research report that it has attributed more than 30 additional hacks to North Korea so far in 2025.
As we enter the final months of this year, these figures will be far greater once all the stats have been compiled. Crypto and financial crime is on the rise due to the rise of AI and other emerging digital technologies. In the same way that legit actors are harnessing the latest technological advancements to streamline operations, malicious entities are also using sophisticated methods, enhanced by AI algorithms, to carry out damaging security breaches.
North Korea, in particular, has been known to orchestrate some of the most malicious hacks like that experienced last year by crypto exchange WazirX. The attack was so severe that the exchange has still not recovered. It’s also worth noting that some platforms tend to receive significantly more support from ecosystem participants like ByBit did (because it may be more of a systemically important exchange to the web3 and crypto sector).
