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FBI CHARGES 3 NOKOR MILITARY HACKERS WITH FINANCIAL CRIMES
- By The Financial District
- Feb 19, 2021
- 2 min read
A US federal indictment unsealed on February 18, 2021 charges three North Korean computer programmers with participating in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy to conduct a series of destructive cyberattacks, to steal and extort more than $1.3 billion of money and cryptocurrency from financial institutions and companies.
The same indictment said the defendants tried to create and deploy multiple malicious cryptocurrency applications and develop and fraudulently market a blockchain platform, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced in Los Angeles.
The hacking indictment filed in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles alleges that Jon Chang Hyok, 31, Kim Il, 27, and Park Jin Hyok, 36, were members of units of the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), a military intelligence agency of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), which engaged in criminal hacking.
These North Korean military hacking units are known by multiple names in the cybersecurity community, including Lazarus Group and Advanced Persistent Threat 38 (APT38). Park was previously charged in a criminal complaint unsealed in September 2018.
A second unsealed case also revealed that a Canadian-American citizen has agreed to plead guilty in a money laundering scheme and admitted to being a high-level money launderer for multiple criminal schemes, including ATM “cash-out” operations and a cyber-enabled bank heist orchestrated by North Korean hackers.
“As laid out in today’s indictment, North Korea’s operatives, using keyboards rather than guns, stealing digital wallets of cryptocurrency instead of sacks of cash, are the world’s leading bank robbers,” said Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
“The Department will continue to confront malicious nation state cyber activity with our unique tools and work with our fellow agencies and the family of norms abiding nations to do the same.”
