North Korea's AI-Powered Crypto Heists Escalate with Banned GPU Usage

North Korea is leveraging banned NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), specifically the GeForce RTX 2700, to enhance its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, which are being utilized in cryptocurrency theft, deepfake creation, and surveillance operations. These GPUs are subject to U.S. export controls and are restricted from shipment to North Korea due to national security concerns and sanctions, yet the country has circumvented these measures to build its AI infrastructure over decades.

Since around 2017, North Korea has been linked to numerous cyberattacks targeting cryptocurrency exchanges, with the Lazarus Group—a hacker collective associated with the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea's military intelligence agency—spearheading these efforts to bypass international sanctions and generate untraceable revenue. The integration of AI has significantly scaled up these operations, enabling hackers to use advanced tools for scanning codebases for vulnerabilities, particularly in smart contracts, and creating convincing fake identities for social engineering scams.

This development raises alarm among global authorities, as the escalating sophistication of AI-driven cybercrimes exacerbates geopolitical tensions and poses a growing threat to cybersecurity. The use of banned components further isolates North Korea internationally, while the automation of theft techniques highlights ongoing challenges in safeguarding financial systems.