North Korea has built an elite army of hackers, rewarding its most successful operatives with luxury apartments in Pyongyang, foreign travel and huge cash bonuses for carrying out cyberattacks, including the reported $6.3bn Binance heist.
Leader Kim Jong Un has overseen a recruitment programme that has operated for more than a decade, selecting about 200 of the country’s brightest middle school students annually for specialised computer engineering education, according to defectors and analysts.
Only a fraction eventually become state hackers, but the programme has transformed North Korea’s cyber operations from running illegal gambling websites into sophisticated attacks targeting major financial institutions and cryptocurrency platforms.
“They are actually one of Kim Jong Un’s secret weapons,” said Kim Heung-kwang, a North Korean defector who trained hackers on behalf of the state before fleeing to South Korea in 2004.
“There is no other country grooming hackers like this, systematically searching for the smartest children, solely to turn them into operatives,” he added. “Whether they want to be a hacker or not does not matter.”
The FBI and cryptocurrency exchange Binance have attributed the hack to North Korea, although Pyongyang has denied responsibility. Blockchain investigation firms have linked the attack to a North Korean hacking group known as TraderTraitor.
The denial follows a pattern in which North Korea has repeatedly dismissed accusations of cyberattacks as fabricated political provocations.