(Reuters)
SEOUL, Nov 6 – North Korea rewards its top hackers, tasked with heists like the Binance crypto hack that netted a cool $6.3 billion, with perks such as a spacious apartment in the capital of Pyongyang and huge hard currency awards.
Leader Kim Jong Un has assembled an army of world-class hackers using such incentives in a programme more than a decade old that picks 200 of the smartest middle school students each year to study computer engineering, defectors and analysts say.
A fraction eventually become hackers in a group that has evolved from running illegal gambling websites in the early days to pulling off the world’s biggest cyber heist last month, they say.
“They are actually one of Kim Jong Un’s secret weapons,” said Kim Heung-kwang, a North Korean defector who trained hackers on behalf of the state before fleeing to South Korea in 2004.
“There is no other country grooming hackers like this, systematically searching for the smartest children, solely to turn them into operatives,” he added. “Whether they want to be a hacker or not does not matter.”
The FBI and Binance have said North Korea was responsible for the Binance hack, but Pyongyang has denied that. Blockchain investigation firms have attributed it to a North Korean group known as “TraderTraitor”.
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