In 2018, US prosecutors accused a North Korean hacker, Park Jin Hyok, of carrying out the Sony, Bangladesh Bank and WannaCry attacks, among many other operations, on behalf of the Kim regime.
“These activities run afoul of acceptable norms of behavior in cyber space and the international community must address them,” John Demers, then assistant attorney-general in the Department of Justice’s national security division, said at the time. “Working for a foreign government does not immunize criminal conduct.”
But analysts note that neither Park, nor two more North Korean hackers identified by the US in 2021 as members of North Korea’s military intelligence agency, nor any other North Korean citizens have ever been brought to justice for their role in hacking or cyber theft operations.
The US has had more success in pursuing foreign nationals accused of assisting North Korea’s efforts.
In April, a New York court sentenced American crypto researcher Virgil Griffith to five years in prison for helping North Korea evade sanctions amid his participation in a blockchain conference in Pyongyang in 2019, while British crypto expert Christopher Emms, accused by the US of helping to organize the conference, fled after he was initially detained in Saudi Arabia earlier this year.
A Nigerian influencer known as Ray Hushpuppi received an 11-year sentence from a US court this month for conspiring to launder funds stolen by North Korean hackers from a Maltese bank in 2019.
But experts say that while Washington has taken action against a handful of entities including banks, exchanges, and crypto mixers, nothing it has done appears to have meaningfully hindered North Korea’s exploitation of the global proliferation of digital currencies.
In part, this is because of the nature of North Korea itself. Of what Demers described as America’s four “principal adversaries in cyber space,” North Korea is the only country able or willing to mobilize its entire state apparatus in support of its global criminal operations.
“If any of the larger nations that have stronger cyber capabilities decided that they were going to use those capabilities to steal cryptocurrency, they would be far more successful than North Korea,” says Plante of Chainalysis. “But they can’t do so without damaging their ability to function in the legitimate global ecosystem.”
“Unlike China, Russia and Iran, North Korea has no stake in the global financial system, and economically speaking they have almost nothing to lose,” says Weisensee.
Last month, South Korea joined US Cyber Command’s annual multilateral cyber exercise for the first time, intensifying their cooperation in the face of North Korean cyber attacks. However analysts also note the difficulty in retaliating against North Korean cyber operations, given how little of North Korean society and infrastructure is connected to or dependent on the internet.