A recent six-month infiltration campaign by North Korean hackers at Drift has sent shockwaves through the crypto industry, still reeling from massive exploits. But as the news settles, a more pressing question emerges: why does North Korea persist in targeting crypto, and what makes its approach distinct from other state-sponsored hacking operations?
According to security experts, the answer lies in the regime's desperate need for a revenue stream to stay afloat. 'North Korea lacks the luxury of patience,' says Dave Schwed, Chief Operating Officer at SVRN and founder of the cybersecurity masters program at Yeshiva University.
'Under comprehensive international sanctions, they require hard currency to fund their weapons programs. The UN and multiple intelligence agencies have confirmed that crypto theft is a primary funding mechanism for their nuclear and ballistic missile development.' This urgency explains why North Korean hackers carry out large-scale, traceable heists on public blockchains instead of quietly using crypto to evade sanctions like other state actors. The reason, Schwed argues, is structural: unlike Russia and Iran, which have functioning economies and use crypto as a payment rail, North Korea has almost nothing left to sell.
Its exports are largely sanctioned, and it lacks a functioning economy that needs a payment rail. 'They need direct revenue,' Schwed explains. 'Crypto theft provides them with immediate access to liquid value, globally, without requiring a counterparty willing to do business with them.' This distinction – crypto as infrastructure versus crypto as a target – sets North Korea apart from Russia and Iran. While Russia and Iran use crypto to work around sanctions and fund proxy networks, North Korea runs a state-sponsored heist operation, targeting exchanges, wallet providers, DeFi protocols, and individual engineers and founders with signing authority or infrastructure access.
'Their targets are those who hold the keys or access to the infrastructure that holds the keys,' says Alexander Urbelis, Chief Information Security Officer at ENS Labs and a professor of cybersecurity at King’s College London. In contrast, Russia and Iran treat crypto as incidental, a means to broader geopolitical ends. 'Russia targets elections, energy infrastructure, and government systems, while Iran goes after dissidents and regional adversaries,' Urbelis notes.
'When either of them touches crypto, it's to move money, not to steal it from the ecosystem.' North Korea's singular focus has led its operatives to adopt tactics more commonly associated with intelligence agencies than criminal hackers: months-long relationship building, fabricated identities, and supply chain infiltration. The Drift campaign is just the latest example.
'You're not defending against a phishing email from a random scammer,' Urbelis warns. 'You're defending against someone who spent six months building a relationship specifically to compromise one person who has the access you need to protect.' Crypto's architecture makes it a uniquely attractive hunting ground.
Unlike traditional finance, where successful hacks encounter friction in the form of compliance checks and settlement delays, crypto transactions are final and irreversible. 'Once a transaction is signed and confirmed, it's final,' Urbelis says. The Bybit exploit earlier last year moved $1.5 billion in roughly 30 minutes, a pace and scale that would be nearly impossible in the traditional banking system.
This finality fundamentally changes the security calculus. In banking, a reasonable defense can be built across prevention, detection, and response, because there's always a window to freeze funds or reverse a wire. In crypto, that window barely exists, making it essential to stop an attack before it happens. While banks operate under decades of regulatory guidance and audit requirements, many crypto projects are still improvising, often prioritizing speed and innovation over governance and controls.
This gap creates an environment where even sophisticated teams can be vulnerable, particularly to the kind of long-term infiltration tactics North Korea has been refining. 'This is the hardest operational security problem in crypto right now,' Urbelis says of the challenge of vetting against sophisticated fake identities and third-party intermediaries. 'I don't think the industry has solved it.'