Picture this: somewhere deep inside one of the most isolated countries on earth, racks of cutting-edge graphics cards are humming away, crunching numbers at breakneck speed. These aren’t supposed to be there at all. Every single one of them is on a blacklist that’s been in place for years. Yet they’re running 24/7, training artificial intelligence that’s getting scarily good at one thing—stealing cryptocurrency on an industrial scale.
I’ve been following state-sponsored hacking for years, and honestly, this latest twist feels different. It’s not just about better phishing emails anymore. We’re talking about AI that can clone voices, generate convincing deepfake videos, predict security patterns, and automate attacks so efficiently that a tiny team could rival the output of entire criminal syndicates. And the fuel for all of it? Banned Nvidia hardware that somehow keeps finding its way past every sanction in the book.
The Hardware That Was Never Supposed to Arrive
Let’s start with the GPUs themselves. Recent intelligence coming out of South Korea points to GeForce RTX 2700-series cards—yes, consumer gaming GPUs—being used in classified research facilities up north. These aren’t some ancient leftovers either; we’re talking relatively modern silicon that’s still powerful enough to train respectable AI models when you stack enough of them together.
How do sanctioned entities get their hands on restricted tech like this? The same way they’ve been doing it for decades—through front companies, mislabeled shipping containers, and a sprawling network of middlemen who don’t ask too many questions. Only now the stakes are higher because the performance gap between sanctioned hardware and cutting-edge hardware actually matters for AI training times.
“Utilizing high-performance AI computational resources could exponentially increase attack and theft attempts per unit time, enabling a small number of personnel to conduct operations with efficiency and precision comparable to industrial-scale efforts.”
— South Korean security researchers, 2025
What Exactly Are They Training?
The published papers—yes, they still publish academic papers, just carefully scrubbed of anything too revealing—focus on four key areas that should make anyone holding crypto sit up straight:
- Lightweight voice synthesis that works even on low-power devices
- Real-time multi-person facial recognition and tracking
- Accent identification (perfect for targeting specific regional exchanges or whales)
- Efficient pattern recognition in massive datasets—think blockchain transaction graphs
Put those together and you have the perfect toolkit for next-generation social engineering. Imagine receiving a video call from “your” exchange support team, complete with perfect deepfake visuals and a cloned voice that knows your recent transaction history because the AI already scraped it. Most people would click whatever link comes next.
From Script Kiddies to AI-Powered Factories
Here’s what keeps me up at night: traditional North Korean hacking units needed hundreds of operators working in shifts, manually sending phishing emails and hoping someone bit. With AI, that same unit can generate thousands of hyper-personalized attacks per hour, test which ones work best in real time, and refine the approach automatically.
We saw a preview of this evolution in November 2025 alone. Over $172 million disappeared from various protocols and wallets. Code exploits still caused the majority of losses, but the speed and sophistication of the social-engineering follow-ups felt… different. Faster. More convincing. Almost machine-like in their adaptability.
And that’s before the really scary models finish training.
The Sanctions Paradox
There’s a bitter irony here. The same export controls designed to starve hostile states of advanced technology have created a perverse incentive: every new generation of AI-capable chips becomes more valuable on the black market overnight. A single A100 or H100 can cost ten times retail in certain corners of the world if the buyer wears the right uniform.
Meanwhile, older “banned” gaming cards like the RTX 3090 or 4090 equivalents are actually easier to smuggle in bulk because customs officials are looking for server-grade hardware with clear enterprise markings. Consumer boxes labeled as “computer parts” slip through far more often than you’d hope.
Where This Road Leads
If current trends hold, we’re maybe 12–18 months away from seeing the first fully autonomous crypto-draining campaigns run by state-level actors. Not scripted bots—these will be adaptive systems that learn from each failed attempt, route around new security measures, and coordinate across hundreds of fake identities simultaneously.
In my opinion—and I don’t say this lightly—the industry’s current defenses aren’t ready. Multi-factor authentication helps, hardware wallets help, but when the attacker can generate a perfect deepfake of your co-founder asking you to approve a “critical treasury transaction right now,” human judgment becomes the weakest link all over again.
We need to start treating voice and video calls with the same suspicion we already apply to random email links.
What Can the Industry Actually Do?
Short term, some practical steps emerge from all this noise:
- Implement mandatory delay periods for large treasury movements—no exceptions
- Move toward biometric-proof authentication methods (zero-knowledge + hardware-bound keys)
- Train every team member to verify urgent requests through pre-agreed secondary channels
- Start watermarking official video communications so deepfakes become obvious
- Pressure manufacturers to embed export-control chips that brick outside approved regions (controversial but technically feasible)
Long term, the uncomfortable truth is that AI offense currently outpaces AI defense. The same tools that let researchers spot anomalies also let attackers hide better. We’re in an arms race where one side has fewer ethical constraints and a lot more motivation.
I’ll leave you with this thought: every time the West tightens sanctions on advanced chips, we’re not just slowing down legitimate research in friendly nations—we’re also guaranteeing that hostile actors will pour unlimited resources into smuggling and indigenous development. Sometimes the cure creates a stronger disease.
The GPUs are already running. The models are already training. The only question left is how much damage gets done before the rest of the world admits the battlefield just permanently changed.
