North Korea Just Pulled Off The Biggest Heist In World History

North Korea has done it again. While the small, isolated, country is no stranger to being behind alleged cyberattacks that land them in headlines, this time they have actually broken a record. On February 26, 2025, the FBI released a public service announcement stating that North Korea was behind a cyber attack theft on ByBit, a Dubai-based cryptocurrency exchange. While you might find yourself personally worried about the uptick of financial losses thanks to bitcoin scams, ByBit is dealing with another scale of loss altogether. The FBI claims that actors from North Korea were responsible for stealing a whopping $1.5 billion worth of cryptocurrency from the exchange, effectively pulling off the largest heist in history.

This heist also showcases a significant jump in North Korea's capabilities. For instance, in all of 2024 combined, North Korean hackers stole roughly $1.3 billion worth of cryptocurrency, meaning this latest hack has effectively topped the country's own previous totals in one attempt. This latest heist also tops a previous record set by Saddam Hussein — who was responsible for taking $1 billion from the Iraq central bank prior to the start of the U.S. invasion of the country in 2003. That being said, let's take a deeper look at North Korea's latest cyberattack to fully understand its significance.

According to a U.N. experts panel, between 2017 and 2023, North Korea has allegedly been behind over 50 different cyber attacks that have resulted in over $3 billion in stolen funds — all of which the panel is currently investigating. That said, you might be wondering what exactly the purpose of these cyber attacks are. 

For starters, the country of North Korea is fairly closed off from the rest of the world. With a limited number of trading partners – including China and Russia, – the country has a limited number of available methods for making money to help their economy. At the same time, with all of the country's extravagant military demonstrations and missile launches, one would be right to wonder where the money is coming from to fund all it all. According to the same U.N. experts panel who is investigating North Korea's cyberattacks, the money they have stolen is also largely being used to fund their development of a nuclear program. After all, weapons programs, let alone nuclear weapons programs, are not cheap to fund.

The way that North Korean hackers stole $1.5 billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency from ByBit was, in fact, very elaborate. These hackers essentially created a fake interface that mimicked legitimate software, allowing them to intercept a routine transaction ByBit was making with one of the company's cold wallets (an otherwise secure offline method of storing cryptocurrency). Once the hackers secured the funds they proceeded to convert them into various other cryptocurrencies and essentially scattered them to the wind, making the stolen funds extremely hard to trace. This lack of traceability is part of why cryptocurrency so easily falls victim to scams. That being said, no actual ByBit investors' accounts were affected by this attack.

The implications of this particular cyber attack have been nothing short of catastrophic for the cryptocurrency market, which makes Bill Gates' warning for anyone investing in the asset more relevant than ever. In combination with concerns over Trump's proposed tariffs, this cyber attack contributed to the loss of around $1.3 billion dollars from crypto markets which has subsequently caused significant price drops in major digital assets like Solana and Ethereum. As of late February 2025, Bitcoin is currently trading in the mid $80,000 range after hitting a yearly low of around $82,000 in light of security concerns following the heist — down significantly from its all time high of around $109,000.