Lazarus Group thefts hit $11.87B, equal to 45% of North Korea’s 2025 GDP

The striking figure here is the macro ratio: a single hacking outfit's cumulative haul now rivals a meaningful share of a national economy, which reframes state-linked crypto crime as an economic engine rather than opportunistic theft. The Binance hit being Lazarus's most profitable operation to date suggests exchange-level defenses are not scaling with the group's ambition. For exchanges, custodians and RWA issuers holding tokenized assets, the relevant question is whether the industry's security posture is improving faster than the attackers' returns — and whether that most-profitable-to-date trend continues.