North Korea uses cyber attacks to circumvent international sanctions. This statement was made by Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI for cybersecurity, information technology and intelligence Tonya Ugoretts at a conference from the Aspen Institute, reports The Korea Herald .

In particular, Ugoretz stressed that North Korean hackers hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment systems in 2014, robbed Bangladesh Bank in 2016, and in 2017 launched an epidemic of the encryption virus WannaCry.

“The economic effect of the sanctions is indisputable, so they need money that can be mined by mining cryptocurrencies or bank robberies ,” Ugoretz added.

The representative of the Director of National Intelligence of the United States, Erin Jo, said that the FBI and several other US agencies intend to oppose the criminal activities of the DPRK in the field of cryptocurrency to cover this source of funding for Pyongyang.

It is noteworthy that on May 28, some users of the UpBit cryptocurrency exchange received phishing e-mails in which they were promised non-existent prize payments. These letters contain documentation that, after downloading, launches malware. EST Security believes that North Korean hackers are behind this attack, CoinDesk reports.

Note that earlier in attacks on the Bitcoin exchange to circumvent the sanctions, North Korea was accused of the UN, assessing the minimum damage for the period from January 2017 to September 2018 at $ 571 million.

At the end of 2017, Assistant to the President of Donald Trump on internal security issues, Thomas Bossert, publicly accused the DPRK of spreading the WannaCry epidemic, the losses of which reached billions of dollars.

If you believe the investigation of the company AlienVault, then the stolen cryptocurrency could be sent to the server of the University named after Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang.

Recall, for the first time, mining activity in the DPRK was recorded on May 17, 2017.

How the underground North Korean opposition uses the cryptocurrencies and the Ethereum blockchain can be found in the exclusive material BlockchainJournal here .

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