How North Korea pulled off the biggest heist in history

Just after 2pm last Friday, a notorious group of hackers responsible for some of the worst cybercrimes of the 21st century pulled off what may well be their magnum opus.

- ANTHONY CUTHBERTSON

In the space of just a few minutes, approximately $1.46bn (£1.16bn) worth of digital currency was stolen from Bybit, one of the world’s most popular crypto exchanges, and funnelled across the internet to anonymous wallets. It marked the biggest heist in history.

For comparison, the amount stolen was nearly 30 times greater than the £53m taken during the 2006 Securitas depot robbery in Tonbridge, the UK’s largest ever cash heist. It was also nearly $500m larger than the amount Saddam Hussein stole from the Iraqi Central Bank on the eve of the 2003 Iraq war in an act that is commonly listed as the largest theft of all time.

Details of the operation are still emerging, but what is unique to crypto exchange breaches is that funds can be tracked in real time over the blockchain. Serving as an online ledger, blockchain technology provides for the transparency of every transaction and movement of funds between wallet addresses, even if the owner of an individual wallet is unknown.

This has allowed investigators to follow the stolen assets in real time as the hackers attempt to launder them through various wallets and exchanges, with the pattern closely mirroring a technique used by one of the world’s most sophisticated hacking operations: the Lazarus Group.