Recommendable overview article! Is not a way shut down these massive criminal activities by North Korea? This has been going on for decades using ever changing technologies.
"AI is changing how states operationalise their cyber capabilities. In North Korea’s case, it’s transforming the country into a bigger cyber power by helping Pyongyang expand what it already does: generate revenue, obtain trusted access and collect intelligence at extraordinary scale.
North Korea has built one of the world’s most unusual state cyber programs, treating hacking not only as an instrument of statecraft but as an industry.
Its operations combine cryptocurrency theft, fraudulent overseas IT employment and other forms of cybercrime with longstanding espionage against foreign defence, aerospace, government and policy targets. AI fits naturally into this model because its greatest value is in lowering the cost of running existing fraudulent models.
The scale of North Korea’s malicious cyber activity is already remarkable.
In the first half of 2026, blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs assessed that North Korean hackers stole around US$643 million (A$900 million) in cryptocurrency, accounting for roughly 66 percent of tracked global crypto theft. Pyongyang has effectively industrialised cyber-enabled revenue generation, from large-scale cryptocurrency theft to bank heist operations. It’s turning capabilities once associated with intelligence services and transnational criminal organisations into a reliable source of hard currency. ...
This is most prominent in North Korea’s fraudulent IT-worker operations, in which nationals win legitimate remote IT jobs using fabricated or stolen identities, drawing salaries that benefit the regime while gaining trusted access to the systems they are hired to build.
One estimate has found that as many as 22 operatives submitted at least 166,893 applications to US companies across 2024 and 2025, sat more than 21,000 interviews and secured at least 76 job offers. ..."
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