North Korea doesn't care about compliance
Pyongyang eats alphabet soup for breakfast
North Korea doesn’t care about your security compliance paperwork. They live in the real world.
Do you?
So you ticked some boxes to make the lawyers happy. The usual alphabet soup--MAS TRM. BNM RMiT. PCI DSS. CSSF. HKMA. AUSTRAC. Blah blah blah blah blah.
Insert my hand making a talking motion. North Korea doesn’t care.
About your policies. Or your risk registers. The pen test you never remediate. The MDR provider who doesn’t get crypto. The auditor who gave you a passing grade.
North Korea doesn’t care about your passing grade. Or what your auditor thinks. North Korea only cares if they can hack you.
That’s the test. The one that matters.
In warfare--and yes, that’s what we’re talking about here--North Korea wages war on your crypto company and they either win or lose. This is pass/fail, folks.
Either they hack you or they don’t.
Is your compliance team trained in military defence against a sovereign nation-state?
hint: Your paperwork is useless in battle.
Last year North Korea stole $2 billion in crypto. They didn’t give it back.
Bybit: $1.5 billion. Drift Protocol: $285 million -- last week. Over the last ten years: billions and billions.
Insert Carl Sagan mind a-sploding here.
Now it’s stable coin payment processors’ turn. They sit on $50 million, $100 million, $200 million in stables. Liquid. Has to be. That’s how real-time settlement works.
Wallet infra on Safeheron, Fireblocks, yada yada, MPC in TEEs, yeah you know me.
Until your MPC vendor gets hacked. Or their subvendor gets hacked. Or your developers get hacked. Or your CI/CD pipeline.
Your auditor approved. Your auditor is not sitting in a cubicle in Pyongyang with a dozen hackers tasked 24/7 with robbing your company.
Or you hire a DPRK IT Worker working remotely.
You know, like Tay been telling us all this time?
And that MDR provider? Fuggadeboutit. Useless. As useless against North Korea as your compliance paperwork.
Their customers care about regulators and maybe ransomware on a spicy day. They don’t care about existential risk that can bankrupt your company.
Instantly.
And where TradFi meets crypto? Where the stables live?
Who in your office is thinking about North Korea right now? Not your GRC lead. Or your auditor. LOL. Not your MDR provider either. I hope you got someone. Thinking about military defence on the cyber domain.
Cuz if not?
That’s what North Korea is salivating over right now.
I guarantee it.