(MENAFN- Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (KUNA) -- The US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Tuesday sanctioned eight individuals and two entities for their role in laundering funds derived from a variety of illicit Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) schemes, including cybercrime and information technology (IT) worker fraud.
"North Korean state-sponsored hackers steal and launder money to fund the regime's nuclear weapons program," said Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence John K. Hurley. "By generating revenue for Pyongyang's weapons development, these actors directly threaten US and global security. Treasury will continue to pursue the facilitators and enablers behind these schemes to cut off the DPRK's illicit revenue streams."
As highlighted in the recent Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team report titled "The DPRK's Violation and Evasion of UN Sanctions Through Cyber and Information Technology Worker Activities," this malicious activity poses continuing threats to the United States and the international community, as these operations have been linked to the funding for the DPRK's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and destruction of physical computer equipment, noted a Treasury statement.
The Government of the DPRK relies on a broad range of illicit activity, including cybercrime, to generate revenue for its WMD and ballistic missile programs and explicitly tasks its hackers to raise revenue using illicit methods. DPRK cyber actors are responsible for conducting high-level cyber-enabled espionage, disruptive cyberattacks, and financial theft at a scale unmatched by any other country. Over the past three years, North Korea-affiliated cybercriminals have stolen over USD three billion, primarily in cryptocurrency, often using sophisticated techniques such as advanced malware and social engineering, it pointed out.
In addition, DPRK IT workers are located all around the world, obfuscating their nationality and identities. They earn hundreds of millions of dollars per year by engaging in a wide range of IT development work by obfuscating their nationality with false or stolen identities when they seek employment contracts and create accounts on freelance work websites. In some instances, DPRK IT workers engage other foreign freelance programmers to establish business partnerships. They collaborate with these non-North Korean freelance workers on projects, which were originally commissioned to those workers and split the revenue, it concluded. (end)
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