Seoul: North Korea on Tuesday denied involvement in the recent cryptocurrency heist at Binance, dismissing a US announcement that North Korean hackers were behind the incident as ‘a trite provocation’.
Binance, the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, said hackers stole more than $6 billion in what appeared to be the largest cryptocurrency heist on record. The FBI attributed the theft to North Korea, identifying the operation as ‘TraderTraitor’ and saying it took place on or around October 29.
On Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, called the FBI announcement ‘a trite provocation’ and ‘absurd rhetoric’.
“This is not the first time that the US has attempted to spread misunderstanding of the DPRK in the international community, blindly linking the DPRK with the cyber crime incidents whenever they occur on an international scale,” she said in a statement, using the abbreviation of North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
“On this occasion, we confirmed Washington's hostile attitude toward the DPRK once again and are closely monitoring a variety of persistent provocations of the US against our state,” Kim Yo Jong said.
Outside experts say North Korea has increasingly turned to cryptocurrency theft and other illicit cyber activities as a source of much-needed foreign currency, helping sustain its struggling economy and fund its nuclear programme despite stringent US-led international sanctions and other challenges. In December 2022, South Korea's spy agency estimated that North Korean hackers had stolen 1.5 trillion won ($1.1 billion) in cryptocurrency and other virtual assets over the previous five years.
Although the country has mostly denied involvement, North Korea has been linked to numerous major cyberattacks in recent years, including a 2013 campaign that paralysed the servers of South Korean financial institutions, the 2014 hacking of Sony Pictures and the 2017 WannaCry malware attack.
South Korea's Foreign Ministry said on Monday that North Korea's illicit cyber activities posed an increasing threat to the global digital economy and that Seoul was closely cooperating with the US and the broader international community to address the threat.
The Binance heist came as North Korea ramped up its weapons tests in what was seen as a likely bid to increase its leverage in potential diplomacy with the US, after US President Donald Trump expressed a desire to restore ties with Kim Jong Un. On Tuesday, North Korea said it had tested a new cluster warhead for strategic cruise missiles.
Asked by reporters later at a Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Trump suggested investigators were not yet certain that North Korea was involved.
“I'm not concerned. We're learning about it,” Trump said of the case. “We don't know if it's North Korea,” he added, while saying investigators could still determine that it was.
In a cyber alert issued on October 31, the FBI said it had observed the attackers converting the stolen assets, worth approximately $6.36 billion, primarily into Ethereum. It warned that the funds could be moved through decentralised finance platforms and instant-swap services to conceal their origins.
The FBI, working with the US Secret Service and the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation division, urged cryptocurrency exchanges, DeFi platforms and other virtual asset service providers to block transactions linked to the stolen funds.
The agency has also published a list of cryptocurrency addresses connected to the theft and asked organisations to prevent transactions involving them.
(With agency inputs from AP via PTI, ANI)
