Sometimes missed on North Korea’s voluminous list of human rights abuses are its serial cyber kleptomania and global criminal schemes to rip off the world’s financial systems. Just days ago, we got a grim reminder of the massive cyberthreat it poses to global finance.
A federal indictment unsealed recently charged three North Korean computer programmers with criminal conspiracy to steal and extort more than $1.3 billion of money and cryptocurrency from financial institutions and companies, even to the point of using malicious cryptocurrency applications and systems to defraud.
There is a method to North Korea’s cyberattacks. Effectively blocked from most traditional global financial channels and with a gross domestic product of about $18 billion, roughly half the economic output of Vermont, North Korea is in perpetual search of money.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s ruthless regime, sometimes dubbed the Sopranos State, is financially fragile, and in many ways, desperate. Without the Kim family’s dynastic myth that only a Kim can lead the country, brutal oppression backed by a massive military and strategic isolation of its impoverished citizens from foreign influences, North Korea would be a completely collapsed state.
The federal takedown is crucial, but federal agents have the daunting task to stay on top of North Korea’s cyber kleptomania.
This linchpin to the regime’s survival, if unchecked, will continue to exploit vulnerabilities in cybersecurity and capitalism to the world’s detriment.