Kim Yo Jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, has responded this Tuesday to the accusations made by the authorities of the United States about the alleged involvement of Pyongyang in the theft of 6,000 million dollars (about 5,300 million euros) in cryptocurrencies stolen from the Binance platform.
According to the official North Korean agency KCNA, the accusation filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is "absurd" and reveals the "hostile attitude of Washington toward the DPRK", acronym for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, official name of North Korea. "It is a serious political provocation by the United States against the DPRK", it added.
The FBI has held the North Korean elite hacker unit known as TraderTraitor responsible for these computer piracy operations, which it had already identified as the author of the attack against Bybit in February 2025. According to the investigation, the attackers transformed the stolen funds into Ethereum, an open-source network sustained by blockchain technology.
In addition, the U.S. agency has indicated that those assets are expected to "be subsequently laundered through their conversion via DeFi services", that is, an ecosystem of applications that operate on cryptocurrency networks without intermediaries, "thus preparing them for later stages of money laundering".
The cryptocurrency exchange Binance suffered what it initially described as a "security incident", with a total damage estimated at more than 5,000 million euros, of which it would have managed to immobilize less than half. After the intrusion, the company decided to temporarily halt deposits and withdrawals while it completed the security checks.
A cybersecurity-specialized company had already pointed to the elite hacker unit of North Korea as responsible for what is considered the largest 'ciberatraco' recorded to date, an attribution that has now been endorsed by the Government of the United States.