[Anchor]

Amid a relentless wave of hacking incidents at home and abroad, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange has now been attacked. About KRW 8 trillion worth of assets were stolen. Notably, an analysis has emerged identifying North Korea as the culprit behind this attack. The suspicion points to an elite hacking organization under the Reconnaissance General Bureau, which has been committing cyber terror to secure ruling funds and weapon development funds for North Korea. If this is confirmed to be true, a substantial ripple effect is expected.

Reporter Jung Hye-jin has the report.

[Reporter]

Binance is the world's largest virtual asset exchange, used by 320 million people.

This morning (October 30), Binance abruptly suspended withdrawals, stating that a security issue had occurred.

Five hours after the initial notice, Binance announced that the exchange had been breached due to an external hack.

It suggested that an attacker may have infiltrated the system and made unauthorized withdrawals of cryptocurrency after a laptop belonging to an internal employee was hacked.

The scale of the damage officially disclosed by Binance amounts to approximately KRW 8.4 trillion.

This shatters the previous record for the largest damage amount, instantly quadrupling the previous record.

Binance added that it has already frozen about KRW 4 trillion worth of assets, which is roughly half of the damage, and stated, "We will compensate for all losses."

TRM Labs, a U.S. firm specializing in analyzing coin transaction histories, pointed to North Korea as the mastermind behind this hack.

It stated that North Korea's elite hacking organization, TraderTaitor, stole the largest scale of virtual assets in history in just 20 minutes.

TraderTaitor is an organization under the Reconnaissance General Bureau, which oversees terror and cyber warfare, and was also pointed to as the perpetrator that hacked KRW 2 trillion worth of cryptocurrency from another exchange, Bybit, last year.

Following major coin companies like Tether and Circle freezing Binance assets, the impact spread domestically as well, with South Korean virtual asset exchanges such as Upbit, Bithumb, and Coinone urging caution.

[Hwang Seok-jin / Professor, Graduate School of International Information Security, Dongguk University : Because there is a very high possibility that most of them are exposed to attacks by AI agents, security systems focused solely on intrusion prevention have certain limitations.]

Meanwhile, it has been confirmed that personal information of some residents in GS Engineering & Construction apartment complexes has also been leaked domestically, showing that our society as a whole is becoming a target for hackers.

(Video by Seol Chi-hwan, Video Editing by Won Hyung-hee, Design by Kim Han-gil)