Kim Yo-jong has denied that North Korea was behind the theft at Binance. In a press statement the Korean Central News Agency carried, she called the US assertion “absurd rhetoric” and a “grave political provocation.”
The FBI attributed the theft to a North Korean hacking effort it calls TraderTraitor, as PTYcoin reported on 31 October.
Statement released on 2 November
The agency’s item is datelined Pyongyang on 3 November and says she issued the text the day before. It lists her as a department director on the Central Committee of North Korea’s Workers’ Party.
She described a theft of billions of dollars in cryptocurrency at Binance, called that venue the largest exchange of its kind in the world, and said Washington had again pointed at the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). In that account the FBI wants the country labeled a criminal state in cyberspace, based on a claim that a hacking group with Pyongyang’s backing took part.
She said Washington has tied the DPRK to cyber incidents in other countries before, including an attempt last year to put the DPRK behind a hack at the exchange Bybit.
The statement rejects the practice of treating cyber crimes in many countries as the DPRK’s doing. It describes the US line as an effort to hurt the DPRK’s image abroad, its dignity, and its standing as a nation, and as a breach of sovereignty in a domain the text treats as new. It sets the government’s usual position as opposition to malicious activity online, refusal to use a cyber incident as politics or as a way into another country’s affairs, and a view of cyberspace as an asset people hold in common.
Who would receive the recovered coins
She suggested a motive on the US side. When the current administration entered office last year, she said, it announced that crypto taken unlawfully would be seized and kept as a strategic reserve of the state, and that whoever is handed those coins after they are recovered might show who was behind the theft. The statement gives no evidence for that suggestion, and it names no thief.
She added that the episode confirmed Washington’s hostile stance once more, that Pyongyang is watching further US provocations against the state, and that the stance leaves questions the government means to reconsider.
Net withdrawals since Sunday
BBC reported that Binance gave no answer on the North Korea allegation, and that a spokesperson put net customer withdrawals at $4.72 billion since Sunday, when transactions resumed, against assets of about $157 billion. In that account the share is a limited part of the total. The asset figure already includes the theft, later withdrawals, and price moves, and the pace of withdrawals is easing back toward the ordinary movement of coins on public blockchains.
Comment from the Unification Ministry
According to Yonhap, Kim Yo-jong is the sister of leader Kim Jong-un, a statement from her on a hack is rare, and similar cases in the past usually produced a statement from the foreign ministry.
A senior official at the Ministry of Unification in Seoul, quoted in that report, called this the first time Kim herself has issued a statement on accusations of cyber theft by the North, and said Pyongyang seems to be taking the international fallout from the Binance case seriously and has raised the reply by having her speak.
