NEWS: North Korea
Funding of a missile program by stolen cryptos, according to several reports.

North Kore­an cyber­at­tacks have stolen mil­lions of dol­lars worth of cryp­tocur­ren­cy to fund the coun­try’s mis­sile pro­grams, accord­ing to a UN media report.

Between 2020 and mid-2021, cyber attack­ers stole more than $50 mil­lion worth of dig­i­tal assets, inves­ti­ga­tors have found.

Such attacks are a “sig­nif­i­cant source of rev­enue” for Pyongyang’s nuclear and bal­lis­tic mis­sile pro­gram, they said.

The find­ings were report­ed­ly sub­mit­ted to the UN Sanc­tions Com­mit­tee on Friday.

The cyber­at­tacks tar­get­ed at least three cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchanges in North Amer­i­ca, Europe and Asia.

The report also ref­er­ences a study pub­lished last month by secu­ri­ty firm Chainal­y­sis which sug­gest­ed that North Kore­an cyber­at­tacks could have yield­ed up to $400 mil­lion in dig­i­tal assets last year.

And in 2019, the UN report­ed that North Korea had racked up around $2 bil­lion for its weapons of mass destruc­tion pro­grams using sophis­ti­cat­ed cyber attacks.

North Korea has been banned by the UN Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil from con­duct­ing nuclear tests and launch­ing bal­lis­tic missiles.

How­ev­er, the UN report says that despite crip­pling sanc­tions, North Korea has been able to con­tin­ue to devel­op its nuclear and bal­lis­tic mis­sile infrastructure.

It also con­tin­ued to seek equip­ment, tech­nol­o­gy and know-how abroad, espe­cial­ly through com­put­er means and joint sci­en­tif­ic research.

Sanc­tions mon­i­tors said there had been a “marked accel­er­a­tion” of mis­sile test­ing by Pyongyang.

The Unit­ed States said on Fri­day that North Korea — offi­cial­ly known as the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Peo­ple’s Repub­lic of Korea (DPRK) — had con­duct­ed nine mis­sile tests in the past month alone. .

“The DPRK has demon­strat­ed increased rapid deploy­ment capa­bil­i­ties, high mobil­i­ty (includ­ing at sea) and improved resilience of its mis­sile forces,” the sanc­tions mon­i­tors said.

On Fri­day, Chi­na and Rus­sia refused to sign a state­ment con­demn­ing the pro­lif­er­a­tion of North Kore­an mis­sile launches.

On Sun­day, the Unit­ed States announced that its spe­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive for North Korea would meet with Japan­ese and South Kore­an offi­cials lat­er this week to dis­cuss the situation.

The UN report also found that the human­i­tar­i­an sit­u­a­tion in North Korea con­tin­ued to dete­ri­o­rate. He said this was like­ly the result of the coun­try’s deci­sion to close its bor­ders dur­ing the pandemic.

A lack of infor­ma­tion from North Korea meant it was dif­fi­cult to deter­mine the extent of the suf­fer­ing caused by inter­na­tion­al sanc­tions, he said.