North Korea it's poor dilapidated and completely isolated or at least that's what it's like on
the surface but if we go into cyberspace north korea is the most dangerous and feared nation
on the entire planet kim jong-un's government has a secretive hacking team called bureau 121
charges thursday against an alleged north korean hacker the defendants are part of
a north korean military intelligence agency still 1.3 billion dollars by hacking computers
and creating the wannacry ransomware north korea engaged in this attack
the thing that sets north korea apart from other countries is they have their very own
state-sponsored hacking group this group causes a ton of chaos and steals billions of dollars every
year but despite all this you've probably never heard of them before they are named the guardians
of peace yes that is their actual name the guardians of peace are also known as the who
is team or the lazarus group they have hacked billion dollar companies governments around
the world private and central banks crypto wallets and exchanges and maybe even you
all this makes the guardians of peace and north korea billions of dollars every year but what
exactly is the guardians of peace they are the biggest cyber crime group in the world many other
cyber crime groups exist but in the end their members normally end up identified and arrested
but this isn't a concern for any members of the guardians of peace that's because they have state
backing from the north korean government meaning that they will never be extradited to any country
that wants them we actually know the three main people behind the guardians of peace it's believed
the head of the guardians of peace is park jin hyuk he is a north korean programmer and hacker he
is said to have masterminded north korea's hack of sony pictures and was also a key developer
of the wannacry ransom virus we have this guy's name photos of him and even his email addresses
but north korea denies he even exists two more key members of the guardians of peace are john
chang hyuk and kim il the guardians of peace are associated with bureau one two one this is
north korea's cyber warfare agency similar to the usa's nsa they're also associated with unit 180.
this is a north korean cyber warfare cell it's a division of the rgb which is north korea's version
of the cia but why exactly are these hackers so feared after all they're not exactly the best or
brightest hackers in the world they've been caught multiple times and their code is fairly basic
the reason why they are so feared is because of how big their rap sheet really is their first
big hack was in 2009 it was dubbed operation troy they used a computer worm known as my doom
and carried out various large-scale ddos attacks of u.s and south korean websites
a ddos or distributed denial of service attack is where you send lots of traffic to one website this
crashes the website which can be seriously bad if it's a bank or government website it can lead
to millions or even billions of dollars of lost revenue but this was lightweight compared to what
the guardians of peace had up their sleeve next in 2013 their attacks began to get more sophisticated
they launched an attack named 10 days of reign this targeted anything digital in south korea
south korean media sites were taken down atms and banks were hacked and critical infrastructure of
south korea was tampered with too many don't realize that north korea and south korea are
technically still at war they signed a ceasefire in 1953 but in reality the war between north and
south korea is still going on to this day later in 2013 things got even worse for south korea the
guardians of peace hacked south korean broadcast companies financial institutions and even an
internet service provider this meant a large portion of south koreans simply lost access to the
internet for some time but the guardians of peace really came to prominence in 2014. this was when
sony pitches was hacked by north korea this was because sony was about to release a movie named
the interview the interview starring seth rogen and james franco showed them going to north korea
the movie was a comedy but they were very critical of the north korean government especially how the
north korean elites live a luxury lifestyle while most of the country is starving they also showed
kim jong-un getting blown up which of course would be outrageous to the north korean government
so the guardians of peace stole large amounts of data from sony pictures they leaked many damning
emails making sony executives look very bad they also leaked unreleased movies from sony and the
personal information of over 4 000 employees the us called this an act of cyber terrorism and it
really marked the guardians of peace as one of the most dangerous hacking groups in the world even
though they were only hacking a movie studio it was still an attack on the usa this was something
we had never seen from a state actor before the guardians of peace demanded sony pitchers not
release the interview sony actually obliged and said they would not show the movie in theaters
this response was heavily criticized as they were basically admitting defeat to north korea
even obama called out sony for this for the first time the fbi publicly named the guardians of peace
north korea responded by saying that they had nothing to do with the hack and said it was
likely an american hacker who simply sympathized with north korea but i don't think there are many
of those around the fbi also determined that the ip address being used and the hacking was
coming from north korea there were also some ips coming from china this is very normal with north
korean hacking north korea has a very limited internet in fact they only have what's known
as an intranet this is basically a closed off contained internet just for the country nothing
gets in and nothing gets out this means they have a very small number of ip addresses in the country
and that's why they sometimes mask their activities with a chinese ip address
the guardians of peace laid low for a couple of years but in 2016 they cropped back up again
and this time they came back bigger and badder than ever in february 2016 they
carried out one of the biggest bank heists of all time 35 fraudulent swift messages were
sent by north korean hackers a swift message is basically a message from one bank to another
for example telling one bank to send a set amount of money to another bank these messages were used
to illegally transfer nearly 1 billion dollars the money belonged to the central bank of bangladesh
so using the swift system the guardians of peace sent 35 instructions but only 5 of these were
successful this meant that 101 million dollars was transferred out of the account 81 million of these
dollars were sent to the philippines and the other 20 million was sent to sri lanka the remaining 30
transactions amounting to 850 million dollars were blocked and the 20 million dollars north
korea sent to sri lanka was actually recovered and some of the money sent to the philippines
was recovered as well in the end north korea made out with around 58 million dollars still a pretty
good payday the rest of the money was laundered from sri lanka and the philippines to north korea
but you may wonder why were only 5 of the 35 transactions approved you see in the message
they claimed the money was going to an ngo named the shalika foundation but they misspelled the
word foundation as foundation this made the banks very suspicious and they blocked the transactions
meaning that 850 million dollars was lost all thanks to a simple misspelling
it's safe to say the north korean hacker behind that misspelling ended up in a work camp if north
korea succeeded in this they would have stolen 1 billion dollars making it the biggest bank heist
of all time these guys are basically playing cyber gta but in the end north korea only made off with
around 58 million which is still a lot it really seemed at this point like the guardians of peace
just did not care even though everyone knew they were behind these attacks
no one could do anything about it you see if hackers have government backing the chance of
them being extradited is basically zero i talked about this already in my video on russian hackers
russian hackers do similar things and despite the fbi knowing basically everything about them
there's nothing that can be done that is if they're working with the government which
in the case of north korea and russia they are but definitely in 2017 the guardians of peace
took things way too far they launched something named the wannacry attack wannacry was basically
the biggest piece of ransomware to ever hit the globe and because this thing spread like crazy
it got out of control very quickly what the virus did was encrypt all files on someone's computer
they would then have to pay a few hundred dollars in bitcoin to get all of their files unlocked
it's believed this was made to target individuals in the usa and the uk and wealthy countries like
that and also some corporations too who could definitely pay this money but the big problem was
the wannacry virus spread like wildfire it quickly spread to poor countries where people had nowhere
near this amount of money a few hundred dollars in bitcoin is not a whole lot to people in the usa
but in countries like india that's basically like asking someone for a month's salary it also
spread to institutions like hospitals in the uk and universities in china of course this caused
massive disruption all over the world and for all we know the wannacry virus cost people their lives
it affected around 200 000 computers in around 150 countries and mainly countries which aren't even
that hostile to north korea for example russia india ukraine and taiwan but why did wannacry
spread like this well the way wannacry actually travels is via a crypto worm crypto worms are
viruses that travel between computer networks meaning that if one network in say a school is
infected then it will spread to all of the other computers on that network you can really see how
this would get out of control super fast now of course all of these bitcoin transactions are
visible on the blockchain and using a simple wallet viewer i can see how much money the
wannacry virus actually made surprisingly it's not a lot despite over 200 000 computers being
infected only 163 people actually paid up and in total the hack made north korea around 72
thousand dollars not exactly a big payday seeing as their previous hack made around 58 million
but the wannacry virus hack is important for a different reason that's because it's the first
time north korean hackers realized how important crypto could be using crypto currencies like
bitcoin and monero which is even more private than bitcoin north korea can effectively get
around any sanctions levied against them in 2018 bitcoin and monero began taking off in south korea
lots of young south koreans were buying into these cryptocurrencies for the first time the guardians
of peace noticed this and began launching another attack they used phishing emails which pretended
to be from hang girl office han girl office is basically like the south korean version of
microsoft office many students used this and these same students owned a lot of cryptocurrencies
so these students ended their usernames and passwords into these phishing emails sent by
north korean hackers as soon as they did this they had their crypto wallets drained and using
this info north korean hackers drained the south korean students crypto wallets in total they stole
around seven million dollars in just one year one south korean bitcoin exchange named ubit had 17
of all of their assets stolen by north korean hackers and they later had to declare bankruptcy
because of this a crypto mining company named nicehash had 4500 bitcoins stolen that same year
that's around 275 million dollars at bitcoins peak in 2019 the guardians of peace launched
a new malware named electric fish using this malware they stole millions of dollars from
companies all over the world including 49 million dollars from a single company in q8 and if you
thought the guardians of peace would chill out when it came to covid then you'd be wrong
the guardian of peace actually hacked various companies in order to steal their vaccine patterns
but in march of 2022 the guardians of peace carried out their biggest hack yet
they stole 600 million dollars and they did it by hacking a crypto game they hacked the blockchain
network connected to a very popular game named axi infinity axi infinity basically allows you
to earn money while playing the game a lot of people play this game as their job they basically
earn cryptocurrency simply from playing the game the game's virtual currency axs has a market cap
of 1.1 billion dollars meaning that 1.1 billion dollars of real money is in this cryptocurrency
and this is after they were hacked by the guardian of peace it's honestly pretty insane how the
guardians of peace have stolen billions of dollars over the years and it seems that with crypto
currencies they have hit their jackpot cryptos are very unregulated and also fairly anonymous
meaning that it's even harder to go after these hackers it's safe to say we have not heard the
last of the guardians of peace unfortunately cyber warfare is the future if you don't
believe me it's what all of the world's elites have been talking about for the past two years
this is way cheaper and easier for north korea to do instead of wasting millions of dollars
firing nukes which simply blow up or fall into the sea they can run a few lines of code and make
millions if not billions of dollars cyber warfare is not expensive to do all you need is computers
and talented hackers and clearly with the guardian of peace that's exactly what north korea have
but now it's time for you to make your voice heard what are your thoughts and opinions on this and
how do you think we can stop the guardians of peace if you want to check out my short videos
then take a look at my second channel but as always thanks for watching i've been Charlie leave
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