The total amount of cryptocurrencies stolen by the regime since 2017 is at least $6 billion.
Hacker groups working for the North Korean government have stolen over $2 billion in cryptocurrencies since the beginning of the year, according to analytics company Elliptic.
Elliptic published an article on its blog with this new estimate, which the company says is “the largest annual amount recorded to date, with three months still to go until the end of the year” and is based on over 30 hacking attacks this year.
The previous record was in 2022, when North Korea stole $1.35 billion. The total amount of cryptocurrencies stolen by the regime since 2017 is at least $6 billion, according to Elliptic, which said that figure may still be an underestimate.
“The real figure could be even higher. Attributing cyber thefts to North Korea is not an exact science,” the blog post said.
“We know of many other thefts that have some of the hallmarks of North Korea-related activity, but we don’t have enough evidence to attribute them definitively. Other thefts are likely to have gone unreported and remain unknown,” Elliptic explained.
The company said North Korea’s main targets are still crypto exchanges, but the regime’s hackers are also starting to target “high net worth individuals” who hold large amounts of cryptocurrency.
And that’s not the only change lately, the company said.
“The majority of hacking attacks in 2025 were carried out through social engineering, in which hackers deceive or manipulate people to gain access to cryptocurrency. This marks a shift from earlier attacks, which in many cases exploited technical flaws in crypto infrastructure to steal funds. This shift highlights that the weak point in cryptocurrency security is increasingly human, rather than technical,” the blog post said.
Elliptic’s assessment appears to be consistent with that of other organizations. Last year, the UN Security Council estimated that between 2017 and 2023, North Korean hackers stole $3 billion worth of cryptocurrencies. If we add Elliptic’s estimates of $2 billion for this year and $742.8 million for last year, the total amount approaches $6 billion.
The governments of Japan, South Korea, and the US accused North Korean hackers of stealing more than $659 million in 2024, which is approximately the same amount as Elliptic’s estimate.
The UN believes that Kim Jong-un’s regime is using the stolen cryptocurrencies to finance its nuclear program.
This year’s record is mainly due to a massive theft of over $1.4 billion from the Bybit crypto exchange, which the FBI and several blockchain monitoring companies and researchers attribute to North Korea.
Other victims of North Korean hackers in the crypto world over the years include the game Axie Infinity ($625 million in 2022), the crypto startup Harmony ($100 million in 2022), and the crypto exchange WazirX ($235 million in 2024), among many others. | BGNES
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