North Korea’s crypto heist playbook is expanding and DeFi keeps getting hit

“If you’ve identified a configuration as unsafe, don’t ship it as an option,” Schwed said. “Security that depends on everyone reading the docs and getting it right is not realistic.”

The fallout has not stayed limited to Kelp. Like many DeFi systems, its assets are used across multiple platforms, meaning problems can spread.

“These assets are a chain of IOUs,” Schwed said. “And the chain is only as strong as the controls on each link.”

When one link breaks, others are affected. In this case, lending platforms like Aave that accepted the impacted assets as collateral are now dealing with losses, turning a single exploit into a wider stress event.

Decentralization marketing

The attack also exposes a gap between how decentralization is marketed and how it actually works.

“A single verifier is not decentralized,” Schwed said. “It’s a centralized decentralized verifier.”

Urbelis puts it more broadly.

“Decentralization is not a property a system has. It is a series of choices,” he said. “And the stack is only as strong as its most centralized layer.”

In practice, that means even systems that appear decentralized can have weak points, especially in the less visible layers like data providers or infrastructure. Those are increasingly where attackers are focusing.

That shift may explain Lazarus’ recent targeting.

The group has begun zeroing in on cross-chain and restaking infrastructure, Urbelis said, the parts of crypto that move assets between systems or allow them to be reused.

These layers are critical but complex, often sitting underneath more visible applications. They also tend to hold large amounts of value, making them attractive targets.

If earlier waves of crypto hacks focused on exchanges or obvious code flaws, recent activity suggests a move toward what could be called the industry’s plumbing, the systems that connect everything together, but are harder to monitor and easier to misconfigure.

As Lazarus continues to adapt, the biggest risk may not be unknown vulnerabilities, but known ones that are not fully addressed.

The Kelp exploit did not introduce a new kind of weakness. It showed how exposed the ecosystem remains to familiar ones, especially when security is treated as a recommendation rather than a requirement.

And as attackers move faster, that gap is becoming both easier to exploit and far more expensive to ignore.

Read more: North Korean hackers are running massive state-sponsored heists to run its economy and nuclear program