Last year an engineer working for the blockchain gaming company Sky Mavis thought he was on the cusp of a new job that would pay more money. A recruiter had reached out to him via LinkedIn, and after the two spoke over the phone, the recruiter gave the engineer a document to review as part of the interview process. But the recruiter was part of a vast North Korean operation aimed at bringing in funds to the cash-poor dictatorship. And the document was a Trojan Horse, malicious computer code that gave the North Koreans access to the engineer’s computer and allowed hackers to break into Sky Mavis. Ultimately they stole more than $600 million—mostly from players of Sky Mavis’s digital pets game, Axie Infinity. It was the country’s biggest haul in five years of digital heists that have netted more than $3 billion for the North Koreans, according to the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. That money is being used to fund about 50% of North Korea’s ballistic missile program, U.S. officials say, which has been developed in tandem with its nuclear weapons.
Full exclusive : How North Korea’s Hacker Army Stole $3 Billion in Crypto, Funding Nuclear Program.
