SEOUL, South Korea — SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Tuesday denied its involvement in the recent cryptocurrency heist at Binance, calling a U.S. announcement that North Korean hackers were behind the incident a “trivial provocation.”
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said Friday that hackers stole more than $6 billion in what appears to be the largest cryptocurrency heist on record. The FBI later said the theft was orchestrated by North Korean hackers, attributing the attack to a hacking group known as TraderTraitor, which was also behind a $1.5 billion hack of the Bybit exchange last year.
On Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, called the FBI’s announcement “a banal provocation” and “absurd rhetoric.”
“This is not the first time that the United States has attempted to sow misunderstanding about the DPRK in the international community, blindly linking the DPRK to ‘cybercrime’ incidents whenever they occur internationally,” 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 once again confirmed Washington’s hostile attitude towards the DPRK and closely follow various persistent US provocations against our state,” Kim Yo Jong said.
Outside experts say North Korea is increasingly turning to cryptocurrency theft and other illicit cyber activities as a source of badly needed foreign currency, helping to prop up its ailing economy and fund its nuclear program in the face of tough U.S.-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) worth of 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 crippled the servers of South Korean financial institutions, the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, and the 2017 WannaCry malware attack.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said Monday that North Korea’s illicit cyber activities pose a growing threat to the global digital economy and that Seoul is cooperating closely with the United States and the broader international community to address the threat.
The Binance theft came as North Korea has stepped up its weapons testing in a likely bid to increase its influence in possible diplomacy with the United States after US President Donald Trump expressed his desire to restore diplomacy with Kim Jong Un. On Tuesday, North Korea announced that it had tested a new nuclear warhead for strategic cruise missiles.
Questioned by reporters later at a Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Trump suggested that investigators were not yet certain that North Korea was involved.
“I’m not worried. We’re learning more,” Trump said of the matter. “We don’t know if it’s North Korea,” he added, although he said investigators could still determine if that was the case.
In his statement on Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong said: “We have issues to reconsider from various aspects regarding the very unpleasant hostile attitude of the United States. »
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