North Korea: A Singaporean-based Crypto Exchange, DragonEx, reported over their telegraph last week that they had been hacked, resulting in the theft of the majority of their funds. The company originally stated over the weekend that their website was down for maintenance, but eventually told the truth about losing their customers’ funds. The exact amount was not disclosed, but there were many different cryptocurrencies involved. The company managed to release the wallet ID’s that the currency was transferred to and reached out to other crypto exchanges asking them to block all transactions from those wallets. DragonEx stated that they plan on taking responsibility for the stolen money and will continue to try to recover the rest of the funds. The company only made the news release on telegraph and has stayed silent on Twitter and other social media outlets about this breach.
Analyst Notes
North Korea has a long-standing reputation of being involved in the attacks on crypto exchanges. In the past years, there has always been an increase in attacks from them after sanctions were put in place. After the news that they were exploiting a loophole in one of their sanctions, the United States put a stop to it, but did not add any new sanctions. Because the sanctions became tighter though, and North Korea could not trade that particular way, there is a possibility that they revisited one of their older tactics to gain money in order to supplement the loss from the tightening of sanctions.
