North Korea Denies Binance Hack, Calls FBI Probe ‘a Trite Provocation’

North Korea on Tuesday, 3 November, denied any involvement in the record-breaking heist at Binance, dismissing the United States announcement blaming North Korean hackers as “a trite provocation” the Associated Press reported on 3 November. The denial, delivered by Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, is Pyongyang’s first direct response to the FBI’s attribution of the theft — and it sets up a direct clash between Washington’s investigators and North Korea’s leadership over the largest cryptocurrency theft on record.

What Pyongyang said

Kim Yo Jong called the FBI announcement “a trite provocation” and “an absurd rhetoric” according to the AP report on 3 November. In a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), she argued that Washington routinely blames Pyongyang whenever a major cybercrime occurs The News reported on 3 November, citing KCNA:

“This is not the first time that the U.S. has attempted to spread misunderstanding of the DPRK in the international community, blindly linking the DPRK with the ‘cyber crime’ incidents whenever they occur on an international scale,”

“On this occasion, we confirmed Washington’s hostile attitude toward the DPRK once again and are closely monitoring a variety of persistent provocations of the U.S. against our state,”

Kim Yo Jong added, in the KCNA statement:

“It is a grave political provocation against the DPRK that the US misleads the international public opinion as if all the cybercrimes in different parts of the world are our deeds,”

“But the US assertion is an absurd rhetoric and nothing new,”

The language matters because of who delivered it. Kim Yo Jong is not a foreign-ministry spokesperson reading a routine denial; she is the leader’s sister and one of the most powerful figures in the regime, and her statements are treated as direct signals of Pyongyang’s position. Titans Infos covered the FBI’s original attribution and the exchange’s first response in Binance $6.3 Billion Hack: FBI Blames North Korea as Withdrawals Resume — Tuesday’s statement is the other side of that story, arriving four days after Binance disclosed the theft.

The heist and the FBI’s attribution

Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, said on Friday that hackers stole more than $6 billion in what appears to be the largest cryptocurrency heist on record the AP reported. The FBI later said the theft was orchestrated by North Korean hackers, attributing the attack to a hacking group known as TraderTraitor, which was also behind a $1.5 billion hack of the Bybit exchange last year according to the AP. The scale has already hit wider crypto markets, as Titans Infos reported in Binance $6.3 Billion Breach Pushes Bitcoin to Six-Week Low.

Outside experts say North Korea has increasingly turned to cryptocurrency theft and other illicit cyber activities as a source of badly needed foreign currency, helping sustain its struggling economy and fund its nuclear programme in the face of stringent US-led international sanctions the AP reported. That is the context investigators cite for the attribution: in December 2022, South Korea’s spy agency estimated that North Korean hackers had stolen 1.5 trillion won ($1.1 billion) in cryptocurrency and other virtual assets over the previous five years according to the AP, citing the South Korean agency’s estimate. North Korea has mostly denied involvement in past cases, even as it has been linked to numerous major cyberattacks over the years, including the 2014 hacking of Sony Pictures and the WannaCry malware attack of 2017 the AP reported.

Seoul backs Washington — Trump sounds less certain

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday that North Korea’s illicit cyber activities pose an increasing threat to the global digital economy and that Seoul was closely cooperating with the United States and the broader international community to address the threat the AP reported. That allied backing contrasts with the reaction from the US president himself.

Asked by reporters during a Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, President Donald Trump suggested investigators were not yet certain that North Korea was involved the AP reported:

“I’m not concerned. We’re learning about it,”

“We don’t know if it’s North Korea,”

Trump added that investigators could still determine that North Korea was responsible according to the AP. The gap between the FBI’s confident attribution, Seoul’s warning and Trump’s public caution is now part of the story: the technical case against TraderTraitor will have to be argued in public, while Pyongyang uses the uncertainty to frame the accusation as a political provocation rather than a criminal finding.

What to watch next

Three things will decide where this goes. First, whether US investigators publish evidence linking TraderTraitor to the Binance theft, as they have in past North Korea attributions — a public technical case would make the denial harder to sustain internationally. Second, whether more of the stolen funds are tracked and frozen as they move, which would test both the hackers’ laundering routes and the exchanges’ response. Third, the diplomatic temperature: the heist comes as North Korea has ramped up weapons tests and Trump has expressed a desire to restore diplomacy with Kim Jong Un the AP reported, and Kim Yo Jong closed her statement by saying Pyongyang has “issues to reconsider” in light of Washington’s hostile attitude. For the full background, start with the original Binance hack report, where the FBI first blamed North Korea and withdrawals resumed.

Read Next

• Binance $6.3 Billion Hack: FBI Blames North Korea as Withdrawals Resume
• Binance $6.3 Billion Breach Pushes Bitcoin to Six-Week Low