| First, it was the supernotes—expertly forged $100 bills that apparently yielded $15 million a year to North Korea. But the US cracked down and changed its bill design, so the totalitarian country pivoted to hacking global banks, as Ben Buchanan writes in this excerpt from his new book, The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics. By co-opting a few machines at the Central Bank of Bangladesh and using them to burrow into the system that enables transactions between financial institutions—and in a stroke of genius, by disabling a very specific printer—hackers were able send hundreds of millions of dollars to entities around the world. Most of those transactions were caught in time, but $80 million vanished. A few years later, the banking system was hit with another, different kind of attack, one that involved ATMs and "money mules" in 28 countries. The effect of these attacks can go beyond mere theft: The actions also act to destabilize financial systems and reduce trust. "They incur setbacks, to be sure," writes Buchanan, "but over time their hackers have garnered vast sums for the regime while threatening the perceived integrity of global financial systems." And there is no reason to think North Korea will stop its intrusions anytime soon. Sarah Fallon | Deputy Editor, WIRED |
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