According to a new report released by CrowdStrike, North Korean adversaries (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK) stole billions in digital assets in 2025 while industrializing cybercrime with AI-powered deception.
The CrowdStrike 2026 Financial Services Threat Landscape Report found that Hands-on-keyboard intrusions against financial institutions spiked 43 percent globally and 48 percent in North America over the past two years. Adversaries, the report said, exploited trusted identities and SaaS applications to evade legacy defense systems.
Based on frontline intelligence from CrowdStrike Counter Adversary operations tracking more than 280 named adversaries, digital asset theft hit record levels in 2025. DPRK-nexus actors drove a 51 percent year-over-year increase in digit theft, stealing more than $2 billion. Pressure Chollima conducted the largest financial theft ever reported – $1.46 billion in cryptocurrency through trojanized software distributed through a supply chain compromise.
The report also found that North Korea used AI to scale operations against the sector. Famous Chollima doubled its operations using AI-generated identities to infiltrate cryptocurrency exchanges, fintech platforms, and consumer banks. Stardust Chollima deployed AI-generated recruiter personas and synthetic video conferencing to target fintechs across North America, Europe and Asia. The report also said 4233 financial service organizations appeared on dedicated leak sites marking a 27 percent increase.
“Financial services organizations face threats from every direction and AI is making each of them harder to stop. The cost to create convincing identities, automate reconnaissance, and accelerate credential theft is near zero,” said Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike. “Adversaries are using AI to compress the time from initial access to impact, moving through trusted paths faster than legacy defenses can respond. To close that gap, defenders have to meet AI with AI – pairing intelligence with hunting to outpace the adversary.”