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…
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$293M Hack Leads to Run on DeFi Platforms
Aave sees $10 billion withdrawn by panicked users
A $293 million hack led to a bank-run style withdrawal frenzy on leading decentralized finance lending protocol Aave, which saw some $10 billion pulled from its liquidity pools over the weekend. In all, more than $13 billion in total value locked (TVL) has been withdrawn from DeFi projects. The trouble began when the KelpDAO’s LayerZero-powered bridge was hacked on April 18. That allowed attackers to use stolen rsETH — what’s known as a liquid restaking token — as collateral for loans on a variety of projects, with Aave getting the lion’s share. A bridge is a protocol that allows users to take one type of token, such as ether (ETH)…