$285 Million Drift Hack Traced to Six-Month DPRK Social Engineering Operation
$285 Million Drift Hack Traced to Six-Month DPRK Social Engineering Operation
Source: The Hacker News
Published: Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:25:00 GMT
Drift has revealed that the April 1, 2026, attack that led to the theft of $285 million was the culmination of a months-long targeted and meticulously planned social engineering operation undertaken by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) that began in the fall of 2025.
The Solana-based decentralized exchange described it as "an attack six months in the making," attributing it with medium confidence to a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group dubbed UNC4736 , which is also tracked under the cyptonyms AppleJeus, Citrine Sleet, Golden Chollima, and Gleaming Pisces.
The threat actor has a history of targeting the cryptocurrency sector for financial theft since at least 2018. It's best known for the X_TRADER/3CX supply chain breach in 2023 and the $53 million hack of decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Radiant Capital in October 2024.
"The basis for this connection is both on-chain (fund flows used to stage and test this operation trace back to the Radiant attackers) and operational (personas deployed across this campaign have identifiable overlaps with known DPRK-linked activity)," Drift said in a Sunday analysis.
In an assessment published in late January 2026, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike described Golden Chollima as an offshoot of Labyrinth Chollima that's primarily geared towards cryptocurrency theft by targeting small fintech firms in the U.S., Canada, South Korea, India, and Western Europe.
"The adversary typically conducts smaller-value thefts at a more consistent operational tempo, suggesting responsibility for ensuring baseline revenue generation for the DPRK regime," CrowdStrike said. "Despite improving trade relations with Russia, the DPRK requires additional revenue to fund ambitious military plans that include constructing new destroyers, building nuclear-powered submarines, and launching additional reconnaissance satellites."
In at least one incident observed in late 2024, UNC4736 delivered malicious Python packages through a fraudulent recruitment scheme to a European fintech company. Upon gaining access, the threat actor moved laterally to the victim's cloud environment to access IAM configurations and associated cloud resources, and ultimately diverted cryptocurrency assets to adversary-controlled wallets.
Drift, which is working with law enforcement and forensic partners to piece together the sequence of events that led to the hack, said it was the target of a "structured intelligence operation" that required months of planning.
Starting in or about fall 2025, individuals posing as a quantitative trading company approached Drift contributors at a major cryptocurrency conference and international crypto conferences under the pretext of integrating the protocol. It has since emerged that this was a deliberate approach, where members of this trading group approached and built rapport with specific Drift contributors at various major industry conferences that took place in several countries over a period of six months.
"The individuals who appeared in person were not North Korean nationals," Drift explained. "DPRK threat actors operating at this level are known to deploy third-party intermediaries to conduct face-to-face relationship-building."
"They were technically fluent, had verifiable professional backgrounds, and were familiar with how Drift operated. A Telegram group was established upon the first meeting, and what followed were months of substantive conversations around trading strategies and potential vault integrations. These interactions are typical of how trading firms interact and onboard with Drift."
Then, sometime between December 2025 and January 2026, the group onboarded an Ecosystem Vault on Drift, a step that required filling out a form with strategy details. As part of this process, the individuals are said to have engaged with multiple contributors, asking them "detailed and informed product questions," while depositing more than $1 million of their own funds.
This, Drift said, was a calculated move designed to build a functioning operational presence inside the Drift ecosystem, with integration conversations continuing with the contributors through February and March 2026. This included sharing links for projects, tools, and applications that the company claimed to be developing.
The possibility that these interactions with the trading group may have acted as the initial infection pathway assumed significance in the wake of the April 1 hack. But as Drift revealed, their Telegram chats and malicious software had been deleted right around the time the attack took place.
It's suspected that there may be two primary attack vectors -
Source
Original report: https://thehackernews.com/2026/04/285-million-drift-hack-traced-to-six.html