For the second year in a row, North Korea\u2019s vast cryptocurrency hacking operation has broken its own record, stealing $2.02 billion in 2025, new research says.<\/p>\n
A report published Thursday<\/a> by the blockchain watchdog company Chainalysis found that North Korea broke its own record of $1.3 billion in hacked and stolen crypto like bitcoin and ethereum. That brings the country\u2019s total stolen crypto to around $6.75 billion, the report said. The total amount of stolen crypto around the globe rose to $3.4 billion.<\/p>\n A significant chunk of that comes from the hack of the Dubai-based cryptocurrency exchange Bybit<\/a> this year. The hackers \u2014 who worked for North Korea\u2019s elite government hacking squad, according to the U.S. Secret Service<\/a> \u2014 stole around $1.5 billion, mostly in ethereum, in February, Bybit\u2019s CEO said<\/a>.<\/p>\n Chainalysis is one of a growing number of companies that map out the sprawling network of cryptocurrency transactions, including tracing hacked funds as they\u2019re laundered by criminals.<\/p>\n The United Nations and private researchers have long accused<\/a> North Korea, which is beset by international sanctions and has relations with only a handful of countries, of deploying its hackers to steal cryptocurrency to help fund its nuclear weapons and missile programs.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to stop, because there\u2019s an asymmetry where they\u2019re in general so cut off from the world and such a rogue state,\u201d said Matt Pearl, the director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank.<\/p>\n Part of the theft is most likely due to the increasingly common phenomenon of North Korean hackers\u2019 fraudulently obtaining remote technical jobs<\/a> with international companies, the report said. That access can put them in positions to give their hacker colleagues a foothold to steal cryptocurrency keys and wire crypto to Pyongyang.<\/p>\n There are scattered incidents of other countries\u2019 professional hackers\u2019 stealing large amounts of money. The Secret Service previously linked Chinese government hackers<\/a> to an operation that stole U.S. Covid relief benefits, and the U.S.<\/a> and U.K.<\/a> governments have accused some financially motivated Russian cybercriminals of ties to the Kremlin.<\/p>\n But no country has an alleged operation like North Korea\u2019s, whose hackers working directly for the government routinely steal such large sums from companies around the world.<\/p>\n