Criminal state · February 21, 2025 · 6 min
Lazarus: North Korea empties $1.5 billion from an exchange in one night
MedellínSoftware · Medellín, Colombia
The FBI and the U.S. government attribute the largest crypto heist on record to Pyongyang. Not a teenager. A state that pays for missiles with other people's wallets.
medellinsoftware.com/story/lazarus-corea-norte-bybit-1500-millones/
Take
~USD 1.5B
Target
Bybit
Attribution
DPRK · Lazarus
Date
Feb 21, 2025
On February 21, 2025, Bybit — one of the largest exchanges in the world — lost about $1.5 billion in Ethereum. In hours. The FBI pointed at Lazarus, North Korea's cyber apparatus. The largest crypto heist on record to that date.
Lazarus is not a forum. It is a unit. Sony Pictures in 2014, WannaCry in 2017, Bangladesh Bank, DeFi swaps, executives' wallets. Pyongyang uses cyberspace as a vault: the regime needs hard currency, and code does not ask for a visa.
The method at Bybit, in the early reconstructions, was not an elegant contract exploit. It was the signing interface, and the people who authorize. The weak link again: a human with a key.
What remains is not a crypto-Twitter meme. It is a pariah state funding an arsenal with strangers' balances. Offices without windows, mixers, a country that learned to loot the twenty-first century without crossing a border.
The desk
The file is public. The briefing is requested.
AI and deep military intelligence. Medellín.