North Korea has denied that it was behind the $6.3 billion theft from cryptocurrency exchange Binance, calling the FBI’s allegation a “grave political provocation.”
In a Tuesday statement, Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said: “The FBI is trying to brand the DPRK as a ‘cyber criminal state,’ claiming that it obtained information that a hacking organization ‘supported’ by the DPRK was involved in the incident.”
The statement was carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency and republished by South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
“It is a grave political provocation against the DPRK that the US misleads the international public opinion as if all the cyber crimes in different parts of the world are our deeds,” she added.
Kim also said Washington was using cybercrime allegations to damage North Korea’s reputation. She said the Trump administration had announced plans to confiscate illicit cryptocurrency and use it as a strategic reserve, and suggested that who ultimately received “the so-called stolen cryptocurrency” could offer “a clue about who is behind the hacking incident.”
This statement comes after a few days of disruption for Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
On October 29, Binance said it discovered unauthorized withdrawals worth about $6.3 billion. The company initially said the breach may have involved a compromised laptop used by a DevOps engineer, though it later said it had identified additional points of intrusion. Binance said it found no evidence that wallet private keys had been leaked.
The exchange temporarily suspended withdrawals and said about $3 billion in assets had been frozen as it worked to investigate the attack.
On October 31, the FBI said North Korea was responsible for the theft and identified the alleged operation as “TraderTraitor,” a name it has previously used for North Korea-linked crypto thefts. The agency said it had observed the actors converting stolen assets primarily into ethereum and warned industry companies to block transactions connected to listed wallet addresses.
Binance began restoring withdrawals in phases on November 1 and said it saw a net outflow of about $3.64 billion in under 10 hours.
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