North Korea Stole $7.5 Billion From Crypto. Here's Their Playbook.
2026-04-21 • Quill Audits •
https://www.quillaudits.com/blog/web3-security/north-korea-stole-billions
QuillAudits frames Lazarus Group's cryptocurrency theft as an industrialized DPRK state capability, estimating more than $7.5 billion stolen through social engineering, insider-style access, UI poisoning, laundering infrastructure, and off-chain verification attacks. The report highlights Bybit's Safe{Wallet} UI poisoning, Drift Protocol's long-running in-person social-engineering operation, and KelpDAO's alleged RPC infrastructure poisoning as examples of attacks that bypassed smart contract bugs by targeting people, tooling, and protocol configuration. It also describes DPRK IT worker infiltration under the Wagemole program and recommends hardware-isolated signing, calldata verification, contributor vetting, timelocks, multi-DVN/multi-RPC setups, supply-chain audits, and use of SEAL/Ketman resources.