North Korean hackers blamed for record spike in crypto thefts in 2025
The blockchain analysis company said Thursday in a new report that the $2.17 billion stolen during the first half of 2025 has already surpassed the amount of crypto lost last year. Not only that, the amount of cryptocurrency stolen during the first six months of 2025 was about 17% higher than the same period in 2022, which was previously the worst year on record for stolen crypto.
Much of the stolen crypto this year was attributed to a single breach at crypto exchange ByBit, which saw North Korean hackers steal more than $1.4 billion in crypto, much of it subsequently laundered and funneled into the North Korean regime, per the FBI.
Chainalysis said the ByBit hack falls within a broader pattern of North Korean hacks, which have 'become increasingly central to the regime's sanctions evasion strategies.'
North Korea, largely cut off from the outside world and the international banking system, has become a formidable threat in recent years by targeting Western companies to steal cryptocurrency with the aim of funding its sanctioned nuclear weapons program. North Korea has also relied on thousands of remote IT workers, who infiltrate tech companies to earn a wage, steal intellectual property, and then extort companies into paying so as not to publish their sensitive files.
According to an earlier Chainalysis report, North Korean hackers were blamed for almost two-thirds of all crypto hacks during 2024.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
2 minutes ago
- Forbes
Japan's ‘Womenomics' Push Ages Terribly As Economy Struggles
Pedestrians cross a road in Tokyo, Japan. Noriko Hayashi/Bloomberg Sometimes, it's the pressing election issues that no one is talking about that matter most. Especially when the omission is by design — like the role of women in Japan's economy. I'm as bummed as anyone to have to point this out 12-plus years on since the Liberal Democratic Party returned to power pledging to prioritize gender equality. What was it that then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promised to do for half of Japan's population? Make them 'shine.' In December 2012, the late Abe propelled the LDP back to power with a bold-sounding revival plan. Never mind that it was merely a list of things Japan should've done years earlier. It's better to be late to cut bureaucracy, modernize labor markets, increase productivity and reanimate Japan's innovative animal spirits than never to act. A key strategy to achieve those last two goals was empowering women. All available research shows that nations and companies that best utilize their female workforces are the most vibrant, efficient and prosperous. Any report from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank or investment banks like Goldman Sachs will attest to that. It's no coincidence that the LDP called their plan 'womenomics.' The word is believed to have been coined by then-Goldman Sachs economist Kathy Matsui, whose gender research made her a local celebrity. Abe cited her work when he pledged to increase the role of women in business and politics. Sadly, though, such talk ended up being a shiny object. In 2012, Japan ranked 101st in the World Economic Forum's gender equality index. Today, it's 118th out of 148 countries, a 17-place backslide. And Sunday's election offers its own metric on the dimming hopes for gender parity in the third-biggest economy. In upper house elections, women make up fewer than 30% of candidates. As Jiji Press reported earlier this month, of the 522 people who initially filed candidacies, just 152 were women, or 29.1%. This is shy of the LDP's 35% target for female lawmakers. In fact, in terms of women holding political office, Japan trails Saudi Arabia by 17 places, according to the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union. Why is Japan failing to make such an obvious fix to its underperforming economy? After all, Goldman Sachs has long argued, Japan's gross domestic product would increase by as much as 15% if the female labor participation matched that of men. One reason for the foot-dragging is that the power with Japan's patriarchy is strong. Economic history knows few examples of those with power giving it up willingly. Typically, change is demanded by the masses in ways the ruling class can't ignore. And virtually no one thinks the LDP, which has led Japan with only two brief interruptions since 1955, is going to lose all power on Sunday. Another problem is that Tokyo establishment is much better at treating the symptoms of a problem than addressing it. Abe was far from the first modern leader to latch onto gender disparities as an election issue. Back in the early 2000s, then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi also made a play for fielding more female candidates. But Abe, like Koizumi before him, mostly prodded the Bank of Japan to cut rates to, or near, zero and leave them there indefinitely. As all that free money boosted the economy, there was less urgency to do the hard work of upending the status quo. Yet the last dozen years have been particularly frustrating. The LDP had broad-based public support to level playing fields and smash glass ceilings. And then it just pivoted to other pursuits, leaving Japan quite the gender-equality outlier in Group of Seven circles. This has also been a lost period of lawmakers appearing to understand that the lack of progress plays a role in so many of Japan's biggest challenges. Take Japan's demographic trajectory, one that worries global debt investors wary of the developed world's biggest debt burden. A key reason Japan's birth rate falls year after year to new record lows is Japan Inc.'s poor track record on work-life-balance policies. This has many women delaying childbirth. Then there's the 'informalization' boom that relegates more and more jobs to 'non-regular' status. These gigs pay less, offer less upward mobility and come with less job security. And the vast majority of them go to women. What does Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba have to say about all this? Not much. How about new ideas to empower half of Japan's 124 million people? Crickets. In fact, one of the most vital repairs Japan needs this election season is among the last things anyone wants to talk about.
Fox News
3 minutes ago
- Fox News
GREGG JARRETT: How Obama and cronies created Trump-Russia hoax, and what happens next
Print Close By Gregg Jarrett Published July 19, 2025 Never before in American history has a departing president connived to sabotage and destroy the man who would replace him. Newly revealed documents show that in 2016 then-President Barack Obama and his national security team "manufactured and politicized" phony intelligence to help frame Donald Trump as a Russian asset when they knew it was untrue. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard who unearthed and released the declassified documents on Friday described it as an "egregious abuse of power" that amounts to a "treasonous conspiracy." OBAMA OFFICIALS USED DOSSIER TO PROBE, BRIEF TRUMP DESPITE KNOWING IT WAS UNVERIFIED 'INTERNET RUMOR' Treason is a strong term with an exceedingly high legal standard. So, too, is seditious conspiracy. The use of violence or force is often a central element for both. Closer to the mark are other serious crimes. They include conspiracy to defraud the government and deprivation of rights under the color of law. That is, using knowingly false or fabricated evidence to support a case against Trump and to obstruct or impair a lawful government function such as an election. Not surprisingly, the genesis of the plot began with Hillary Clinton. On July 26, 2016, she allegedly approved an illicit scheme to sully her political opponent for colluding with Russia to rig the upcoming presidential election. The bogus smear was intended to distract from her own burgeoning email scandal. Hillary's campaign commissioned and funded a dossier that was little more than a collection of lies supplied by Clinton confederates. The CIA discovered what Hillary had done and immediately alerted the Obama White House. In two successive meetings on July 28 and Aug. 3, 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed the president and other top officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director James Comey. Brennan's handwritten notes from the Situation Room show how he recounted Clinton's plan "to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service." From that point on, it was a closely guarded secret. It was all a hoax, and the above-named participants well knew it. Yet, none of them had the integrity to step forward to tell either Congress or the American people the truth. Instead, they watched in silence as Comey and his FBI acolytes launched a dilating investigation of Trump dubbed "Crossfire Hurricane." They shamelessly weaponized their authority and contorted the law to persecute Trump. As planned, the fake collusion narrative was leaked to the Trump-hating media. Almost from the outset, the FBI had debunked the dossier and later fired its author, Christopher Steele, for lying. The ex-British spy had been a paid source for the FBI. By concealing this vital information, Comey sought and obtained surveillance warrants from the FISA court on a Trump campaign associate, Carter Page. No evidence of wrongdoing was ever discovered because none existed. When the Russia hoax failed to prevent Trump from winning the presidency, the same malevolent adversaries doubled down on the Clinton-inspired scheme. The new documents released by Gabbard show that a Dec. 8, 2016 draft of the President's Daily Briefing (PDB) assessed that "Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure." But that conclusion, compiled by top intelligence agencies, did not conform to the Trump collusion narrative. Comey and others apparently scuttled the PDB and concocted an alternative plan. The next day, Dec. 9, Obama convened select cabinet officials, along with Clapper, Brennan, and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. A new Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was ordered that would undermine the PDB and perpetuate the Trump-Russia collusion fiction. The replacement narrative would claim that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win the presidency. It didn't seem to matter that it was not true. Brennan and Comey ensured that the discredited dossier was incorporated in the ICA, which was rushed to completion before the new president took office. Why the urgency? So that Comey could use it to entrap Trump into a false confession before his inauguration. On Jan. 6, 2017, the FBI director traveled to Trump Tower armed with the ICA that deceptively alleged Russian interference in the campaign and also confronted the president-elect with salacious accusations in the dossier that the bureau knew were untrue. Comey's unscrupulous gambit failed when Trump vigorously denied the allegations as utterly preposterous, which they were. Meanwhile, there is still more damning evidence that must be declassified —some of it sealed for nearly a decade and buried in the bowels of the FBI and other intel agencies. None of that deterred Comey and his minions at the FBI. They escalated their investigation of Trump and propagated the collusion lie. Clapper leaked the dossier to CNN, as reporters and pundits spent the next year happily convicting the new president in the court of public opinion without a shred of plausible evidence. When Comey was eventually fired, he purloined FBI documents on his way out the door and promptly leaked them to a friend in the media to trigger the appointment of a special counsel who just happened to be his former colleague and mentor, Robert Mueller. In the end, of course, Mueller and his team of partisans —try as they may— could find no evidence of a criminal collusion conspiracy. Those of us who fairly and honestly covered the faux scandal knew it all along. In my 2018 book titled The Russia Hoax, I wrote on page one that "there was not a whiff of credible evidence to legally justify the probe" initiated by Comey. I described it as "a clever feint for a covert criminal investigation in search of a crime, reversing and bastardizing the legal process." I laid out the facts which still hold true today. In my follow-up book the next year, Witch Hunt, I offered more incriminating details of exactly how malign actors aspired and conspired to evict Trump from office: "Evidence against him was invented or embellished. Laws were perverted or ignored. Trump was framed for a 'collusion' conspiracy that had never existed. They knew it was untrue." The newly constituted FBI has already opened a criminal investigation of Brennan and Comey. That is a good start. But they were not the only ones who should be held to account. The list is a long one, and it goes right to the top —Obama and Clinton. It started with the collusion hoax, but it didn't end there. Trump appears to have been the victim of an ongoing criminal conspiracy that stretched for nearly a decade. It eventually evolved into the specious prosecutions brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith that were engineered by the Biden administration and simultaneous coverups of suspected illegality by the Biden family, many of whom received preemptive pardons. On that basis, the FBI is reportedly examining the possibility of bringing a "grand conspiracy" case that would encompass many of the above-noted acts that were intended to unduly influence three presidential elections, 2016, 2020, and 2024. CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION The advantage of adopting this legal avenue is two-fold. First, it would extend any expired statute of limitations to the date of more recent overt acts such as the raid on Mar-a-Lago and events thereafter. Second, it would allow any prosecutions to be brought in a venue other than Washington, D.C., where the endemic bias of jurors make it nearly impossible to gain convictions. Meanwhile, there is still more damning evidence that must be declassified —some of it sealed for nearly a decade and buried in the bowels of the FBI and other intel agencies. But even without it, there is little doubt that top officials at the FBI, CIA, Department of Justice and the White House abused their authority for political purposes. Armed with immense power and often lurking in the shadows, they were capable of uncommon corruption. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP Their allegiance was not to the Constitution and the rule of law but to themselves. Personal animus and a voracious appetite for control motivated their zeal. Trump was their obstacle. He jeopardized their hold on power, so they schemed to destroy him by any means and at any cost. The only cure for lies is the truth. And the only remedy for lawlessness is justice. The pursuit of what is right depends on both principles. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM GREGG JARRETT Print Close URL
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The best Amazon deals this weekend: Apple AirPods are within $1 of their all-time low
Get this: There's a restaurant in China that's put baby lion cuddles on their menu. And it creates a dilemma, right? You're thinking, Hmmm ... that feels at least vaguely exploitive of those precious little cubs. But you're also thinking, Awww, the babies! Can I have two orders ...with extra cuteness? It's a bit like the predicament of post-Prime Day shoppers: You're thinking, I kinda made a killing last week — do I really need to be shopping now? But you're also thinking, Oh, man, the best Amazon deals of this weekend are just too good to resist!Allergy sufferers: This $40-off deal on a highly rated air purifier is sure nothing to sneeze at. And as long as you've got de-dusting on the agenda, how about a 40% markdown on a Black & Decker hand vacuum? (It's the one I rely on at home, and it's down to a record-low price.) Ready to have your mind blown? Behold: A 24" Fire TV for a mere 60 bucks! This is our kind of weekend bargain blowout. Killer discounts ... and no dilemmas! Best Amazon deals: Rare sales Best Amazon deals: All-time low prices Best Amazon deals: Our best-tested products Best Amazon tech deals Best Amazon deals: Style Best Amazon deals: Home Best Amazon deals: Beauty Best Amazon deals: Kitchen If you have Amazon Prime, you'll get free shipping, of course. Not yet a member? No problem. You can sign up for your free 30-day trial here. (And by the way, those without Prime still get free shipping on orders of $35 or more.)
