FBI on alert for North Korean hackers with ties to crypto exchange hacks 

U.S. officials like the FBI, US Treasury, US Cyber Command, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning against North Korean hacker group ‘BeagleBoyz,’ which have resumed its attacks on banks and ATMs around the world. The officials also revealed that the hacker group was behind lucrative cryptocurrency thefts.

The alert said that North Korea had generated hundreds of millions of dollars through the “looting” of crypto exchanges. The warning, though, did not mention which crypto exchanges were hacked by the BeagleBoyz group. BeagleBoyz have attempted to steal nearly $2 billion since at least 2015, according to public estimates.

They likely have targeted financial institutions in the following nations from 2015 through 2020: Argentina, Brazil, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ghana, India, among other countries

The warning pointed out that hackers were an ongoing threat to the Financial Services sector. In fact, the advisory stated that they had been targeting financial institutions in multiple countries since February 2020. The U.S officials believed that the agenda was to initiate fraudulent international money transfers and also caste a “cyber-enabled bank robbery scheme.”

According to the report, it was the experts from the United Nations in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (UN DPRK) that first identified the criminal activity. It led to the United Nations (UN) Security Council to resolve that the illicit activities generated revenue for North Korea. The report further added that North Korea could use these funds to build nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that are prohibited by the UN.