Crypto Brief: Bybit Unleashes RICO Lawsuit on North Korea Over $1.5B Hack

According to recent market coverage, the cryptocurrency venue platform Bybit has sued North Korea in a U.S.

Federal court over last year’s record-breaking $1.5 billion hack.

The company filed the civil lawsuit under seal on June 18, 2026, in the U.S.

The suit names the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, its Reconnaissance General Bureau and the Lazarus Group, the state’s notorious hacking unit, as defendants.

The case centers on the theft of more than 400,000 Ethereum tokens on Feb.

Hackers struck during what looked like a routine transfer from one of Bybit’s cold, or offline, storage wallets.

Investigators later determined attackers had compromised a developer’s computer at Safe{Wallet}, a type of multi-signature protocol Bybit used to manage its wallets, and inserted malicious code that activated only when Bybit’s specific wallet address appeared.

After the approval of what looked like a normal internal transfer, the hidden code altered the underlying transaction instead.