Reports Of North Korea Illegally Mining Cryptocurrency With Evidence

North Korea is currently facing harsh sanctions that have almost crippled its economy. It has in the past been accused of engaging in illegal activities to generate revenues, and the latest accusation involves the newest financial player: cryptocurrency.

North Korea Illegally Mining Cryptocurrency

Cyber security firm AlienVault recently uncovered a North Korean program that has been designed to mine Monero, the 13^th largest cryptocurrency in the market today. It also linked the program to an independent server that holds each coin mined. Both the program and the server are linked to Kim Il Sung University located in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. It wouldn’t also come as a surprise that North Korea has other servers and programs doing exactly the same.

The revelation comes as no shock and so does the reaction of the regime. Kim Il Sung University did not respond to questions about its connection to the con. Additionally, representatives of North Korea at the UN were not available for comment, and it is unlikely that they would comment on it let alone reject the claims.

A New Specialty?

North Korea has shown a keen interest in cryptocurrency technology of late. For instance, one of North Korea’s known IP addresses, 175.45.178.19, was shown to be active on Bitcoin trading sites. What’s more, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology has been inviting professionals to lecture on the matter. One of the invitees is Federico Tenga, a co-founder of the Bitcoin startup Chainside. Federico lectured the university about blockchain technology but did not expound on the technical details citing that he was aware of the limitations imposed by international sanctions on the nation.

North Korea is not focused only on exploiting cryptocurrencies. It has also carried out attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges based in South Korea. This means that it can meddle in other countries’ financial activities by influencing their cryptocurrency exchanges.

The Ideal Exploit

According to the company’s reports, the server was not connected to the global internet so as to obscure observers from finding out its purpose. However, that is not all that North Korea depends on to exploit the conveniences of Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrencies are largely independent from governments, and that makes them easy to exploit. This means that North Korea cannot be sanctioned financially the same way the dollar would be. What’s more, Monero has certain conventional details that make it easier to use compared to other popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin that can be tracked from transaction to transaction, Monero funds are sent to one-time addresses that are generated from random numbers.

Considering that North Korea is considered to be ahead of most nations when it comes to cyber attacks, there is no doubt that it will be taking more advantages of cryptocurrencies as their popularity grows. There are also fears that other countries such as Venezuela and Iran may join the trend as they too are facing limiting sanctions. The worst thing is that there may be no solution to this unless cryptocurrencies are regulated by governments, but this would make them lose their essence.