30 2GM Wednesday February 23 2022 | the times
Wo r l d
North Korea is using increasingly
sophisticated hacking and money-
laundering techniques to steal crypto-
currencies in its latest effort to evade
sanctions and fund its nuclear weapons
programmes.
Kim Jong-un’s government is earn-
ing hundreds of millions of dollars at a
time in hacking raids on cryptocur-
rency “exchanges”, where currencies
such as bitcoin are traded digitally,
studies indicate. The regime is evading
efforts to clamp down on its activities
with the use of the latest digital technol-
ogies that help it to transfer and sell
digital currencies without detection.
North Korea’s state cryptorobber,
known as the Lazarus Group, has
carried out a number of spectacular
heists over the years, including from the
central bank of Bangladesh. Ordinary
North Korean citizens are denied
access to the world wide web, but Lazar-
us continues to mount sophisticated
attacks under the auspices of the coun-
try’s external intelligence agency, the
Reconnaissance General Bureau.
“Pyongyang has demonstrated an in-
creasing interest in using evolving fi-
nancial platforms such as cryptocur-
rency and blockchain technology to
compensate for the fiscal losses related
to economic sanctions,” a report by the
Centre for a New American Security
(CNAS), a Washington think tank, said.
“The cybercrime organisation known
as the Lazarus Group has transformed
from a rogue team of hackers to a mas-
terful army of cybercriminals and for-
eign affiliates capable of compromising
major national financial networks and
stealing hundreds of millions of dollars’
worth of virtual assets.”
State-sponsored crime dates back at
least to the 1970s, when North Korean
diplomats based in Scandinavian coun-
tries began reselling tax-free alcohol
and cigarettes to earn foreign currency.
Since the end of the Cold War,
Pyongyang has been accused of in-
volvement in a wide range of inter-
national criminal rackets, including the
manufacture and sale of narcotics,
counterfeit currency, fake-brand
goods, money laundering and the trade
in rhino horn, ivory and weapons.
Diplomatic bags were frequently
abused for the purposes of smuggling
drugs produced in North Korean fact-
ories, beginning with heroin and opium
but diversifying in the late 1990s into
crystal methamphetamine. Its partners
in these enterprises include Japanese
gangsters, Russian drug dealers, IRA
terrorists, bankers in Macau and
African poachers.
In the past decade it has had spectac-
ular success in different forms of online
hacking, developed in “Laboratory 110”Teachers would be forced to “out”
non-straight pupils to their parents
under proposed legislation that seeks to
stifle discussion of gender identity and
sexual orientation in Florida’s schools.
An amendment to the controversial
Parental Rights in Education bill, nick-
named the Don’t Say Gay bill by critics
for its anti-LGBT agenda, would give
schools a deadline of six weeks to in-
form on students who confide their
sexual orientation to a staff member.
The draft legislation was proposed by
Florida Republicans and is supported
Teachers would be forced to inform on gay pupils under bill change
by Ron DeSantis, the governor, who
has been accused of trying to create
solutions for non-existent problems to
pander to right-wing voters.
Nadine Smith, executive director of
Equality Florida, said: “His political
agenda is driven not by the real pressing
needs of our state but his desire to peel
away Trump supporters as the two Flo-
ridians jockey for the 2024 Republican
presidential primary. He is willing to in-
flict harm on the most vulnerable in our
state in order to shore up his extremist
base.”
In its original form, the bill would
have allowed educators to keep secret achild’s LGBT status if they believed that
sharing the information with parents
could lead to abuse, neglect or aban-
donment.
An amendment filed by the bill’s
co-sponsor Joe Harding, a state con-
gressman, now seeks to remove that
protection and mandate that schools
should use “all available governmental
resources” to share children’s sexual
orientation with their families.
Parents would be able to sue school
districts that breach the law. However,
legal experts said that such cases would
not necessarily end in a win for parents
and that courts may take a dim view ofattempts to limit rights to free speech.
The bill seeks to outlaw instruction that
broaches anything LGBT-related from
nursery to third grade. It has been
embraced by conservatives who have
attempted to paint a debauched image
of LGBT issues in schools.
Harding said: “Kids can and will talk
about whatever they want at school. We
just want to make sure teachers
promote that discussion at the right age
and we want to make sure parents are
kept in the loop.”
Kara Gross, Florida legislative direct-
or of the American Civil Liberties
Union, said: “The bill does nothing tohelp and support our youth. Instead, it
is meant to stigmatise LGBT youth and
family members and make teachers
fearful of providing a welcoming and
inclusive environment.”
The bill was due to go before the state
House of Representatives yesterday.
6 The US Supreme Court has agreed to
hear the case of an evangelical web
designer in Colorado who refused to
produce websites advertising same-sex
marriages on religious grounds. Lorie
Smith appealed against a lower court’s
ruling that rejected her application to
be exempted from anti-discrimination
laws.Jacqui Goddard Miami
Cryptocurrency hacks
help North Korea to
fund nuclear weapons
of Mirim University in Pyongyang.
Early attacks on the websites of South
Korean companies and on GPS naviga-
tion systems were followed by more
ambitious, lucrative ones. According to
a UN panel of experts on North Korea,
its hackers have launched attacks on
financial institutions and cryptocur-
rency exchanges in at least 35 coun-
tries, earning as much as $2 billion.
In 2014, Lazarus took revenge for the
release of a film that mocked Kim, The
Interview, starring Seth Rogan, by hack-
ing Sony Pictures, stealing and publish-
ing emails and other data. Its most no-
torious coup was an attempt two years
later to steal $1 billion from the Bangla-
desh central bank. Most of the transfers
were blocked or recovered, but the rob-
bers still got away with $63 million.
In 2017 the WannaCry ransomware
attack affected 300,000 computers in
150 countries, including those of the
NHS in Britain. The virus froze com-
puter files until a ransom was paid in
bitcoin. The following year hackers
based in North Korea were using a
computer virus to “mine” the crypto-
currency Monero on other people’s
computers, and divert it to Pyongyang.
At about the same time, internet
security experts began to identify Laz-
arus as the perpetrator of thefts from
cryptocurrency exchanges. In 2018 it
stole $230 million in bitcoin, ethereum,
litecoin and dogecoin from the China-
based Gate.io exchange. A year later
DragonEx in Singapore lost $7 million.
The biggest cryptocurrency heist, in
which more than $280 million was
stolen from the Singapore-based
KuCoin, used so-called decentralised
finance (DeFi) platforms, which allow
one type of cryptocurrency to be
swapped for another without the
supervision of any regulator.
The cybersecurity firm Chainalysis
calculates that North Korea stole close
to $400 million in at least seven crypto-
currency attacks last year, although
this was less than the $2 billion in 2019.
Last year the UN panel of experts on
North Korea reported that cybercrime
both directly and indirectly supports
the country’s ballistic missile and
nuclear programmes.North Korea
Richard Lloyd Parry Asia Editor
M
ount
Etna in
Sicily has
sent a
column
of volcanic gas and
debris seven mileshigh and spewed
boulders the size of
large cars over its
slopes, prompting
experts to warn locals
that the volcano is
becoming“increasingly
efficient” (Tom
Kington writes).
The sky darkened,
the airport in nearby
Catania closed and
local towns were
covered in a thin black
layer of ash on
Monday as Etna
belched out about two
million cubic metres
of lava, gas and debris.
“This was the 54thEtna spews out
car-sized rocks
North Korea’s state news agency
has abandoned the western
calendar in favour of its own way
of reckoning the years, based on
the birthday of its founder.
The Korean Central News
Agency now dates its stories as
Juche 111 rather than 2022. “Juche”
is North Korea’s ideology of
self-reliance, and the Juche
calendar begins with the birth of
Kim Il-sung, in 1912, which is
taken to be Year 1.
The system was first introduced
in 1997, three years after the death
of the founding president, but until
this week KCNA had used the
Juche year alongside the western
year.
Kim Jong-un’s regime has
tinkered with time before: in 2015
the North declared “Pyongyang
time”, half an hour earlier than
Korean Standard Time (KST),
which is used in the South.
However, Pyongyang time was
quietly dropped three years later,
at a time of rapprochement
between North and South.Year Zero? It’s
now Year 111
Richard Lloyd ParrySicilySardiniaPalermoCataniaMount EtnaTyrrhenian Sea100 miles
ITALY