North Korean cyber spies are no longer just remote threats

North Korea’s crypto playbook now spans fake developers, conference contacts and major DeFi exploits reaching deep across the industry.

This month’s $285 million exploit on Drift, a decentralized exchange (DEX), was the largest crypto hack in over a year, when exchange Bybit lost $1.4 billion. North Korean state-backed hackers were named as prime suspects in both attacks.

This past autumn, attackers posed as a quantitative trading firm and approached Drift’s protocol team in person at a major crypto conference, said Drift in an X post Sunday.

“It is now understood that this appears to be a targeted approach, where individuals from this group continued to deliberately seek out and engage specific Drift contributors, in person, at multiple major industry conferences in multiple countries over the following six months,” said the DEX.

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