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North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

economist.com

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Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#181

Post by poopiokaka »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #140
Cpoll wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no evidence for this, but my feeling was always that the highest-volume exploits were just having a bot run yesterday's Day-0 on every IP listening on a port. You can't get that kind of volume by calling people and asking for their password. If you leave an unsecured mail server accessible to the internet, it'll start sending spam emails within 30 minutes. On the other hand, phishing emails are also automated,…

It's probably safe to say that phishing is the most common method among APTs like state intelligence agencies. It's cheap, it's easy, it works. No reason to burn zero-days unless simpler methods with less exposure don't work, and they usually do. But we can broadly categorize security incidents into two bins: first are opportunistic attackers which broadly attempt a method that sometimes works. Two common examples ar…

[flagged]

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#182

Post by jollofricepeas »

3np wrote: post #113
woah wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was ultimately in the bridge’s design and implementation. Even though it was sold as a decentralized system it was a multisig with very few signatories. A properly designed decentralized bridge would require the compromise of many validators, each with a different infrastructure setup. This is why you never hear about Ethereum itself getting hacked. Instead, the Axie bridge was a multisig, and as of that…

IIRC the 9 nodes where effectively controlled by 3 sets of keys so they only had to compromise 2 to take control. And they took weeks to discover it happened. The incompetence and brazenness astonishes. Team as well as investors.

Weeks is a short amount of time for security detection. Most high level threat actors are in systems for months.

They’re called Advanced Persistent Threats for a reason.

No snark intended.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#183

Post by opportune »

warner25 wrote: post #87
bsamuels wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you feel the same way about Tor? If 99% of Tor's volume is helping laundering international drug trade money, distributing CSAM, etc, should it be demonized as well?

I think most people do feel that way about Tor, both in terms of assuming that 99% of its users are criminals and that it should be demonized. It's interesting to me because I think most of those people don't feel the same way about encryption in general, which of course enables Tor and all sorts of criminal activity in other contexts. Everyone has something to hide from someone and wants to see the green lock symbol…

There are some things that are perfectly legal for me to Google search, that I don’t want my ISP or Google to know about. So Tor works well for that. Tor would also be useful if governments were to crack down on free speech.

You can apply basically the same argument to money. If I have $20m in Bitcoin I don’t want my name to be tied to my wallet address (because a KYC exchange saw where the money went to) because it makes me a target, for example. And in the case of censorship or something I want to be able to do with the money what I please.

Privacy is a fundamental human right, in my opinion. We have to use cumbersome technology to get any modicum of true digital privacy. Just because people use it for illegal things doesn’t mean that the desire for privacy or the technology itself is bad. One day things we find morally just may be illegal too

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#184

Post by Cpoll »

poopiokaka wrote: post #180
Cpoll wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no evidence for this, but my feeling was always that the highest-volume exploits were just having a bot run yesterday's Day-0 on every IP listening on a port. You can't get that kind of volume by calling people and asking for their password. If you leave an unsecured mail server accessible to the internet, it'll start sending spam emails within 30 minutes. On the other hand, phishing emails are also automated,…

No one worth hacking runs mail servers it’s 2023 lol

Mostly startups use GSuite, big traditional companies and banks still run their own. But that wasn't really my point. My point is that there are a lot of bots looking for low-hanging fruit.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#186

Post by Closi »

dwighttk wrote: post #141
Closi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intentional consealment of illegal internet traffic isn't a crime (the crime is just the crime). Intentional consealment of illegal financial transactions is a crime in-and-of itself (the crime is money laundering, which is a seperate offence to the original criminal activity that the money came from).

conspiracy to commit a crime is often an additional charge (IANAL)

That’s just when two or more people get together to plan a crime - obfuscation isn’t the offence, the offence is the joint planning and intention to commit a crime.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#187

Post by 3np »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #182
3np wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the 9 nodes where effectively controlled by 3 sets of keys so they only had to compromise 2 to take control. And they took weeks to discover it happened. The incompetence and brazenness astonishes. Team as well as investors.

Weeks is a short amount of time for security detection. Most high level threat actors are in systems for months. They’re called Advanced Persistent Threats for a reason. No snark intended.

Its not a short amount of time to realize that your treasury has been looted. They should have had monitoring in place before they had a percentage of the locked up value.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#188

Post by djmips »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #145

I call complete total and utter bullshit. I don't buy, for a second, this narrative that NK would have elite hackers. Do you guys realize how retarded that country is? Everytime the subject comes up I can't but say we're talking about the country where official propaganda pictures trying to make believe they have military hoovercraft (as if it was a cool thing btw) are badly photoshopped. A country with a total GDP o…

Cannot photoshop a picture but CAN make nukes. I think your logic is a bit faulty. It's not written down anywhere that a weakness in something you consider obvious and easy should preclude great strength in other areas. For example, recall that the former Soviet Union had many gaffes that could be mocked and yet had some of the finest space technology that's even still being used today.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#189

Post by throwaway290 »

ETH_start wrote: post #147
throwaway290 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy absolutists are free to deal in cash. Whatever amounts they send and receive, criminals and dictators do orders of magnitude more and people suffer as a result. If it wasn't so sad it would be funny that the countries with highest levels of freedom and least corruption tend to be the ones with most vocal privacy absolutists...

The most powerful states don't need to launder any money, since they can just pass a law legitimizing any action they do, with no need to hide the funds generated from any one else.

This is irrelevant. Anything putin gang does is legal in Russia obviously but being able to clean blood money is vital for them. That's the point of sanctions and why any way around it like crypto is a godsend to dictators.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#190

Post by tablespoon »

smcl wrote: post #152
drewmol wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any good sources on what it’s actually like?

There are probably no good sources for what your average North Korean's life is currently like. There are a handful of famous accounts from a few of those who escaped the country and they're obviously pretty grim (particularly those describing prison camp life) but the stereotype is of this primitive country, which is backwards both ideologically and technologically. I'm not an idiot, I don't believe there's a little…

> But we can at least observe that if they're able to hack that quantity of crypto there is some kind of tech operation going on there, however small it might be. So they're not entirely shut off and they're able to penetrate at least a bunch of western crypto-startups.

I once read a blog post or something from someone who claimed to have gone to North Korea to teach Computer Science or something. This article sounds like it covers similar ground: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4m8qx/how-to-teach-computer....

Also, North Korea also has an elite. IIRC, a significant chunk of North Korean imports are luxury goods and modern consumer products to keep this elite happy.

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