From CryptoPotato · By Wayne Jones
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has rejected allegations by US investigators that it was responsible for last week’s hack on Binance.
In a statement, Kim Yo Jong, who is the department director of the Central Committee of North Korea’s Workers’ Party, called Washington’s accusations a political provocation.
North Korea Flips the Script on the US
Kim’s statement, published by state news agency KCNA on November 3, accused the United States of repeatedly associating North Korea with major crypto thefts without justification, including last year’s $1.5 billion Bybit hack.
The party official, who also happens to be the sister of leader Kim Jong Un, dismissed the latest claims as “absurd rhetoric and nothing new.” She also argued that Washington was trying to damage her country’s international reputation and interfere in its internal affairs.
In one very pointed passage, Kim brought up the US government’s stated intention to confiscate illegally obtained cryptocurrency and add recovered assets to a national strategic reserve to paint it as the actual suspect in the theft.
“The international community needs to recall once again the fact that as soon as the present U.S. administration took office last year, it announced that it would confiscate illegally stolen cryptocurrency assets and use them as a state’s strategic reserve,” the statement read. “If it carefully examines who will get the large amount of the so-called stolen cryptocurrency when the latter is retrieved, it may get a clue about who is behind the hacking incident.”
She concluded by warning that Pyongyang was keeping an eye on the Trump administration’s actions and had “issues to reconsider” over its “hostile attitude” toward North Korea.
The FBI Case
Soon after the hack, Binance announced that it had taken several measures to protect user funds, including halting withdrawals temporarily and bringing in law enforcement to help trace the stolen funds.
A little while later, as CryptoPotato reported, the FBI said the DPRK was responsible for the $6.3 billion attack on Binance, with a state-linked actor, TraderTraitor, observed on-chain converting the stolen assets into ETH and then moving it into DeFi platforms and instant-swap services to hide their origin.
Other investigators, including TRM Labs and Chainalysis, also tied the heist to the same group. Furthermore, on-chain monitors have observed what they say is a portion of the stolen money being moved through several protocols, including THORChain and Relay, pushing up their daily revenues tens of times higher.
Withdrawals have since resumed on the exchange, with users taking out more than $4 billion right after the green light and putting in just over a billion.