How North Korea turned hacking into a state income machine (opens the source in a new tab)
- Cut off by sanctions, North Korea has built cyber warfare into a way to earn foreign currency, the FT reports. Students strong in maths and science are picked as teenagers and trained for years, some abroad in China and Russia.
- Its record runs from the Sony Pictures hack and a Bangladesh central bank raid to crypto heists at Ronin, Bybit and now Binance. Blockchain firm Chainalysis says its hackers stole about $2bn last year, most of the world's total.
- It also plants fake remote workers in foreign firms. Pyongyang denies all of it.
Why it matters Exchanges and banks are not up against freelance criminals but a state that recruits, trains and protects its hackers, and uses the loot to fund weapons. One expert warns AI will make such attacks faster to find and automate.
Other side Attribution rests on investigators and analysts, and Pyongyang calls it slander. Faster freezes and tracing may also shrink what each heist actually nets, so headline sums overstate the regime's take.