TOKYO, Nov 3 — North Korea denied a United States accusation that it was involved in the theft of assets worth more than US$6 billion (RM24.45) from the Binance cryptocurrency exchange platform last week.
Kyodo News reported that Kim Yo Jong, the sister of the country’s leader Kim Jong Un, dismissed the accusation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as “absurd rhetoric” that is “nothing new”.
“The FBI is trying to brand the DPRK as a ‘cyber criminal state” she said, according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) yesterday.
Yo Jong also described the claim as a “grave political provocation” against the country. DPRK is the acronym for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“On this occasion, we confirmed Washington’s hostile attitude toward the DPRK once again,” she said, speaking as a department director of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea’s Central Committee.
On Saturday, the FBI said North Korea was responsible for stealing more than US$6 billion in virtual assets from Binance on or around Thursday, identifying a group it calls “TraderTraitor” as being behind the heist.
The FBI said it has seen TraderTraitor actors converting stolen assets into cryptocurrencies such as Ether. Expecting the assets to go through “further laundering stages,” it asked relevant companies to block transactions linked to certain blockchain addresses.
“It is a grave political provocation against the DPRK that the US misleads the international public opinion as if all the cyber crimes in different parts of the world are our deeds
“We have issues to reconsider in diverse aspects as regards the very unpleasant US hostile attitude,” Yo Jong warned. Pyongyang has not responded to US President Donald Trump’s repeated calls for a resumption of summit diplomacy with the North Korean leader.
During his first term as president, Trump held three in-person talks with Kim in 2018 and 2019, but they failed to reach a deal on the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang has since advanced its missile and nuclear capabilities.
KCNA also reported that the country’s Missile Administration conducted tests yesterday to assess the power of “a dispersal warhead of a strategic cruise missile,” following a test over the weekend of a cluster-bomb warhead, mountable on ballistic missiles and capable of striking an area of 12 to 13 hectares.
The tests confirmed the dispersal warhead tipped on the cruise missile was capable of “turning into ashes a target area of five to six hectares with its highest-density power”, and that Pyongyang has “perfected the capability to deliver a vertical strike against the target.”
Yo Jong noted that developing a variety of weapon systems is more “urgent than ever before” to “deter all sorts of threats.”
Cluster munitions release a number of smaller submunitions over a wide area. North Korea has not acceded to the Oslo Convention against cluster bombs.
