Lazarus Group, The Great Erasure
A heist so complete it erases the evidence of its own existence. For the first time, a bank collapses not from insolvency, but from forgetting.
By Baptiste Forestier, Head of Compliance - EMEA at Flowdesk
In 2026 the Lazarus Group executes the most devastating cyber heist in modern financial history. Rather than merely stealing hundreds of millions from a major international bank the attackers go one step further and destroy the bank’s memory.
Using a multilayered and months long infiltration the group corrupts core banking systems, wipes mirrored backups, scrambles cloud replicas, and injects irreversible cryptographic damage into long term archives. It is worth noting that they leverage AI to run partially automated huge scale attacks, mirroring tactics that China is currently suspected of employing. When the bank comes online the next morning the money is gone and so is every trace of where it went. Transaction records, customer histories, risk metrics, compliance logs, settlement instructions, liquidity models, and even internal audit trails are all corrupted or missing.
A global systemically important institution becomes functionally data blind overnight.
Within hours settlement networks seize up as counterparties refuse to transact without independently verifiable balances. Payment systems buckle under uncertainty. Supervisors cannot determine exposures. Regulators issue emergency stabilization orders while forensic teams attempt to reconstruct the bank’s financial identity from scraps of paper, counterparties’ notes, and whatever uncorrupted fragments remain on disconnected hardware.
For the first time in history a modern bank cannot prove what it owns, what it owes, or who its customers are. The world learns that in a hyper connected financial system the greatest systemic risk may not be insolvency but erased history.
