The holiday season is an especially lucrative period for cybercriminals, but this year the Department of Justice seems to be keeping just as busy tackling foreign cybersecurity threats.
Virgil Griffith was taken into custody for giving a talk about blockchain technology in North Korea. Now a developer for the cryptocurrency Ethereum, Griffith is better known for some of his earlier exploits. More than a decade ago, for instance, he developed the WikiScanner software that linked the IP addresses of people editing Wikipedia entries to the organizations associated with those IPs to figure out when organizations or individuals were changing their own Wikipedia entries.
He’s a U.S. citizen who lives in Singapore, so Griffith’s much easier for U.S. authorities to arrest than Russian cybercriminals, but the national security threat he poses by participating in a conference in North Korea is so unbelievably trivial by comparison to, say, the threat of Evil Corp, that it’s hard to imagine what the government was thinking by wasting time and energy on this case.
Instead, the charges rest heavily on the allegations that Griffith “provided the DPRK with valuable information on blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies, and participated in discussions regarding using cryptocurrency technologies to evade sanctions and launder money.” This idea, that Griffith provided North Korea with some special or secret information about how to use cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions and launder money, is repeated several times throughout the charging document.
For instance, the complaint states that “an organizer of the DPRK Cryptocurrency conference … told Griffith that, during his presentation, Griffith should stress the potential money laundering and sanction evasion applications of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology as such topics were most likely to resonate with the DPRK audience” It goes on to say that “Griffith and other attendees discussed how blockchain and cryptocurrency technology could be used by the DPRK to launder money and evade...
It’s perfectly true that cryptocurrencies can be used for these purposes—just look at Evil Corp, which made more than $100 million through online crimes that relied partly on cryptocurrency transfers. But North Korea already knew that, as did anyone else who’s been paying even a little bit of attention to the cybercrime landscape for the past five years.
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