Nations monitors estimate that these cyber activities now account for approximately 13 percent of North Korea's GDP.[/caption] North Korea’s army of hackers has become so adept at stealing cryptocurrency that the reclusive nation reportedly owns 76 percent of all stolen crypto this year. TRM Labs reported that North Korean hackers have been responsible for at least around a third of all financial losses from cryptocurrency in six out of the past nine years. “Crypto theft is rampant because it's easy.
The system, bereft of institutional safeguards by design, requires that individual participants secure their own assets — a task for which most are not particularly well-suited,” Nate Nelson wrote in a May 1 analysis for DarkReading.com. In 2025, in the U.S. alone, including only known and reported cases, the FBI found that Americans lost more than $11 billion in crypto-focused scams run by cybercriminals such as gangsters in Southeast Asia. In 2026, the North’s cyber thieves are doing their most productive work yet. “By tallying up all of the money crypto traders have reportedly lost to hackers so far this year, analysts found that 76 percent is now in Pyongyang,”
Nelson wrote. It isn't that North Korea is performing 76 percent of all crypto cyberattacks. Rather, it has become proficient in focused, low-frequency, high-reward breaches, according to TRM. TRM analysts believe that these semi-regular, high-yield attacks might be in part an outgrowth of North Korea's increasing adoption of artificial intelligence. “Years ago, the Kim Jong-Un regime came upon an insight that forever changed the trajectory of both cyberspace and geopolitics. Though the hegemonic U.S. could limit its access to global financial markets, the DPRK observed that with each passing day, largely unsophisticated and self-fashioned traders were converting more and more dollars, euros, and pesos into unregulated and insecure cryptocurrency networks,” Nelson noted.
