North Korean Hackers ‘Industrialized’ Crypto Theft

North Korea has “industrialized” cryptocurrency theft, turning it into a primary mechanism of revenue for the pariah state.

That’s the conclusion of a new report by crypto security firm CertiK, which found that North Korean hackers have stolen $6.75 billion over the past decade, $2.6 billion of it in the past 18 months alone. The biggest incident by far was the 2025 Bybit hack, which saw $1.5 billion drained from the exchange.

CertiK pointed to the “precision and scale of North Korean operations,” noting that in the past few years there have been fewer attacks that systematically targeted the highest-value opportunities. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has been blamed for $620 million of the $1.1 billion stolen this year, primarily through the $291 million KelpDAO exploit and the $285 million Drift Protocol attack.

Victims of North Korean terrorism attacks are trying to seize some of the funds stolen in the KelpDAO/Aave attack, saying they technically belonged to North Korea.

“DPRK actors have consistently targeted humans and supply chain weaknesses rather than smart contract code vulnerabilities,” CertiK said. “Across nearly a decade of operations, their primary attack vector has rarely been code. It has almost always been people… Fake VC impersonation, fraudulent job interviews, and malicious code repositories account for the majority of initial access.”

Beyond that, North Korean agents have infiltrated many DeFi protocols under fake identities, operating as trusted insiders as they fed intelligence to state-sponsored hacking units, it said.

Separately, leading crypto security firm Elliptic has closed a $120 million funding round that values the firm at $670 million.

Binance: AI Security Saved $10 billion

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, said in a blog post that its AI-powered security tools have helped prevent users from losing more than $10 billion to scams and fraud since 2025, protecting 5.4 million of its estimated 300 million clients.

That includes preventing almost 23 million scam and phishing attempts targeting two million users in Q1 2026 alone.

“AI is amplifying social engineering at an unprecedented level, powering deepfakes, phishing bots, fake platforms, voice cloning, and impersonation across chat applications, exploiting trust and urgency,” Binance said. “By late 2025, we had already rolled out 24+ AI-driven initiatives and 100+ models — and these numbers continue to grow as we strengthen our defenses against emerging threats.”