A question: how come the North Koreans aren't draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash using equally sophisticated exploits against known technical and human vulnerabilities?
Probably because fiat, unlike crypto, is not decentralized and fraudulent transactions can be reversed. A North Korean hacker zeroing out an account balance and incrementing another, can be reversed.
Exactly. It turns out a lot of the things in the banking system that cryptocurrency people complain about are actually features, not bugs.<p>IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
They have! There was a famous incident in 2016 where NK tried to wire a billion dollars out of the fed and managed to get away with $100 million.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery</a>
They do, here's one example:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery</a><p>I think Darknet Diaries covers a bunch of these types of heists involving banks.<p>I suspect they just assess vulnerabilities and exploit them when/where they can. My understanding is that these thefts are big part of their (NK) economy.
>"draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash"<p>Cash sits in vaults. North Korea would need to physically send a team of bank robbers to extract it. The digital representation of USD is not cash, it's an entry in a ledger, and banks generally have systems that would not allow adding an entry with a sudden transfer of a large amount of money to "J. U. Kim, North Korea". That's why Bitcoin is called "digital cash".
They are trying!