#SecureYourAssets Hackers make North Korea a billionaire with cryptocurrencies.

North Korean hackers have been operating in recent years to steal and accumulate billions of dollars in cryptocurrencies, placing the country on the list of nations with the largest reserves of digital tokens.

At the end of February, hackers belonging to the Lazarus Group – a well-known North Korean cryptocurrency theft network – managed to appropriate 1.5 billion dollars (R$ 8.8 billion) in digital tokens from the cryptocurrency company ByBit, based in Dubai.

According to the company, the group managed to breach its Ethereum digital wallet, the second largest electronic currency after Bitcoin.

Binance News, a new platform operated by the cryptocurrency exchange company Binance, reported that North Korea has already accumulated another 13,562 bitcoins, equivalent to 1.14 billion dollars (R$ 6.7 billion).

Bitcoin is the oldest and most popular cryptocurrency in the world, often compared to gold due to its supposed resistance to inflation. Only the US and the UK have larger reserves than the North Koreans, according to the cryptocurrency platform Arkham Intelligence.

"We won't mince words – [North Korea] achieved this through theft," says Aditya Das, an analyst from the cryptocurrency research company Brave New Coin in Auckland, New Zealand.