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Reuters: North Korea grooms student hackers; Pyongyang denies Binance theft
Japan Today, carrying Reuters, said defectors and analysts describe a long-running North Korean program that selects school-age students for cyber work, after the FBI and Binance blamed Pyongyang for last month's Binance hack, which it denies.
- Japan Today is now reporting this
- New headline Was: “North Korea's army of world-class hackers is secret weapon that took down Binance”
- Our desk filed its story
Based on reporting by Japan Today
Wire reporting: (Reuters, via Japan Today)
Japan Today republished a Reuters report on Nov. 6 describing a North Korean program that, according to defectors and analysts named in the piece, selects middle-school students for computer training that can lead to military cyber work1.
The reprint said the FBI and Binance have attributed last month's cryptocurrency theft at Binance, described as $6.3 billion, to North Korea, and that Pyongyang has denied the accusation1. Blockchain investigation firms were cited as linking the incident to a group called TraderTraitor1.
Kim Heung-kwang, identified as a defector who trained hackers before leaving in 2004, and two other defectors who worked in IT were the main on-record sources for the selection pipeline, the reprint said1. South Korea's National Intelligence Service was cited for a 2024 estimate of about 8,400 people in North Korean cyberwarfare operations1.
Binance, according to that account, said attackers used a bogus job interview and software hidden in an advertisement, then an internal AI tool1. Reuters published a matching headline; its page could not be read here.
