Japan
CoinPost
Seven Agencies from Japan, US, Australia, and Germany Announce North Korean Hacker Group 'WaterPlum' Stole 1.7 Billion Yen in Crypto
- Japanese authorities identified and shut down the country's first known 'laptop farm' operation, run by a local enabler, through which several hundred million yen worth of crypto was funneled overseas.
- In May 2025, a suspected North Korean IT worker applied for an engineering position at a Japanese crypto exchange using a fabricated resume, but was rejected after inconsistent interview answers raised suspicion, resulting in no actual damage.
- Authorities recommend never running untrusted third-party code outside a sandbox or virtual environment, isolating suspected-infected devices from the network immediately, moving assets to a newly created wallet with an offline-stored seed phrase if compromise is suspected, and for companies, deploying EDR tools and using VS Code 'Restricted Mode' to block automatic execution of tasks.json when opening unknown projects.