Crypto hacks in 2025 amount to $3.4B in losses, led by North Korea

00:00 Speaker A

You guys do this report annually and it’s always really interesting to see what happened in the crypto world because there do tend to be these hacks. So the the total figure is $3.4 billion in 2025. Um, how does that compare with prior years? And what do we need to know about that that total aggregate number?

00:27 Jonathan

The total aggregate number is actually fairly consistent across the years. So, uh, last year was, was actually a very similar amount of money stolen, but there are some trends inside the total figure that I think are worth pointing out. Um, if you look at the amount of money stolen by DPRK, uh, by North Korea, that is actually up significantly year over year to 2 billion out of that 3.4 billion, which represents a real risk for the national security community. And really it relates to nation state level actors getting access to cryptocurrency at a, at a level that is, that is concerning for governments around the world.

01:21 Speaker A

And, and why is North, is North Korea getting better at doing it in some way? If so, how are they getting better at doing that? Like, what, to what do you attribute that big increase there in particular?

01:44 Jonathan

Their level of sophistication across their operation is actually increasing. And I I would say that, you know, we break that down into two elements. One is getting hands on the funds in the first place, and the second is the laundering procedure that they follow afterwards. In terms of them getting their hands on funds, they are infiltrating organizations with, you know, tech workers. People may have heard of, you know, the North Korean IT worker that has been given a job at a tech company that then is, you know, infiltrating, stealing source code, getting access to different systems that then get leveraged for, you know, these types of attacks moving forward. Um, they’ve also increased that level of sophistication where they are now not just posing as an IT worker, but they are also posing as recruiters talking to IT workers to gain access to their systems, to gain intelligence about how things are operating to to commit these types of attacks. So, in terms of getting their hands on their crypto, that infrastructure around the IT worker, around infiltrating big organizations, they have become much more sophisticated at doing that, and it’s a major threat that the industry is really tackling head on.

03:00 Jonathan

And then the the process of laundering those proceeds, they have increasingly become the most sophisticated money launderers in the game too. And so we have observed them breaking down the amount that they have been stealing into very small chunks and following, you know, a pretty sophisticated integration and layering program to, you know, obfuscate those funds being reintegrated into the financial system and ultimately being used to pay for, you know, the war machine and and and nuclear weapons.

03:52 Speaker A

Jonathan, it’s really interesting on the on the front end of that, not the money laundering, but when they’re doing the infiltration, that it’s not technological so much as it is human, right? Like people actually going in and doing that work, which is frankly surprising to me. So how then do you defend against that? Is it a matter of better background checks? Like how how does that work?

04:28 Jonathan

A lot a lot of uh businesses that are at risk are doing um in-person interviews, for example, for, you know, critical roles. There’s a lot of provisioning of systems where, you know, you don’t allow people to get access to sensitive systems uh, and you only get that to happen over time. There’s a lot of technology that also gets used now in even remote interviews where you can really verify where someone is and, you know, find ways to detect, you know, different things happening on the computer itself. And and really this is a cat and mouse game as the attackers get more sophisticated and the defenders in the HR teams now need to really be consciously protecting the organization, not just bringing talent into the company.