Apt38

Lazarus Group is a cyber threat actor that the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, Treasury/OFAC, and the United Nations Panel of Experts have attributed to North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), a military intelligence agency of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). U.S. and allied government agencies allege the group and its sub-units (tracked in industry reporting as APT38, BlueNoroff, TraderTraitor, and Stardust Chollima) have conducted destructive cyberattacks and large-scale cryptocurrency thefts since at least 2009, including what blockchain-analytics firm Chainalysis describes as a cumulative total exceeding $6 billion in stolen crypto assets, funds the UN Panel of Experts and U.S. officials allege support North Korea's weapons programs. This entry documents named individuals, government indictments, sanctions, and specific hacking incidents, distinguishing DOJ/FBI/OFAC/UN attributions from private-sector research findings.

CoinEx is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange that suffered a major hot wallet breach on September 12, 2023, with losses estimated between $54 million and $70 million across multiple blockchains. On-chain investigators ZachXBT and Elliptic attributed the attack to the Lazarus Group (TraderTraitor), a North Korean state-sponsored threat actor, based on wallet address overlap with the contemporaneous Stake.com hack. Stolen proceeds were subsequently laundered in part through the Sinbad Bitcoin mixer, which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury's OFAC on November 29, 2023.

CoinsPaid (operating legal entity Dream Finance OÜ, headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia) is a business-to-business crypto payment processing platform founded in 2014 by Max Krupyshev and Pavel Kashuba. The company suffered two confirmed external cyberattacks — a $37.3 million theft in July 2023 and a $7.5 million breach in January 2024 — both attributed to third-party attackers with the first definitively linked to North Korea's Lazarus Group by blockchain analysts and the FBI; client funds were reported unaffected in both incidents. The company is currently navigating significant regulatory uncertainty under the EU's MiCA framework after losing its legacy Estonian FIU licence and suspending operations through its Lithuanian entity, while its CASP application in Estonia remains pending as of mid-2026.