[Anchor]
Global blockchain analytics firms are pointing to North Korea as the mastermind behind this incident, in which an astronomical amount of money was stolen in less than 20 minutes. With cryptocurrency hacking effectively becoming a "key industry" for North Korea, warnings are mounting that such attacks will only become more frequent.
Reporter Kim Young-a has the details.
[Reporter]
The first attack on the Binance wallet began at 4:05 p.m. on the 29th, U.S. Eastern Time.
Just 17 minutes later, the hackers made off with a total of 8.4 trillion won worth of cryptocurrencies, including Ripple, Bitcoin, and Tether.
It was a little over an hour later, at 5:14 p.m., that the cryptocurrency industry became aware of the hack and took action.
However, the hackers had already scattered and laundered the Bitcoin across multiple wallets, and had exchanged a significant portion of the Tether—which issuers can freeze—into Ethereum, which is much harder to freeze.
Blockchain analytics firms are pointing to North Korea's elite hacking organization, TraderTraitor, as the mastermind behind this lightning-fast operation.
[Jonathan Levin / CEO, Chainalysis: "(In this incident) we have identified a link to the Bitget hack, which is strongly suspected to have involved North Korean hacking groups."]
Previous record-breaking breaches, such as last year's Bybit hack and this year's Bitget hack, are also all presumed to be the work of North Korea.
The UN Security Council Panel of Experts estimated that North Korea earned more than 3 billion dollars through cryptocurrency thefts from 2017 to 2023.
They pointed out that roughly half of North Korea's foreign currency earnings and about 40 percent of its weapons development costs are funded by these funds.
In effect, cryptocurrency theft has become a "key industry" for sustaining the North Korean regime.
However, U.S. President Trump remained tight-lipped about who was behind the incident.
[Trump / U.S. President: "We don't know yet. We're looking at the Binance hack. We're looking at it right now."]
With the emergence of AI making it easier to scan for security vulnerabilities, outlooks suggest that North Korea's cryptocurrency theft crimes will become even more rampant.
(Video by Kim Jin-won | Design by Kang Yoon-jung)
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