FBI’s Binance hack charge is “absurd rhetoric,” North Korea says

North Korea has brushed aside the FBI’s claim that its hackers stole more than $6 billion from Binance as “an absurd rhetoric and nothing new.”

The remark was made by Kim Yo Jong, sister of leader Kim Jong Un and a department director of the Workers’ Party of Korea’s Central Committee, in a press statement issued on November 2.

Kim Yo Jong calls the accusation a grave political provocation

“The FBI is trying to brand the DPRK as a ‘cyber criminal state’, claiming that it obtained information that a hacking organization ‘supported’ by the DPRK was involved in the incident,” Kim said in the statement, carried by state news agency KCNA. She described the charge as “a grave political provocation against the DPRK.”

Kim connected the charge to last year’s Bybit hack, which she said Washington also tried to blame on Pyongyang. She pointed to the U.S. plan to hold confiscated crypto as a strategic reserve, and said a look at who gets the stolen funds back “may get a clue about who is behind the hacking incident.”

Pyongyang has “issues to reconsider in diverse aspects” over Washington’s hostile attitude, Kim said in the statement. It named no specific step, nor did it offer any technical rebuttal of the attribution.

Pyongyang’s denial meets TraderTraitor evidence from three firms

In an alert on October 31, the FBI said North Korea “was responsible” for the theft on or about October 29. The Bureau refers to the activity as “TraderTraitor.”

The FBI has been working with the Secret Service and IRS-CI, and has observed the attackers convert stolen assets mostly into Ether.

Blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs was among three firms that identified the attack as the work of North Korean operators before the FBI. The same attribution was made on X by Chainalysis co-founder Jonathan Levin.

The attacker used EIP-7702 on Ethereum to convert a Binance hot wallet into a sweeper under its control. It prepared 50 pre-signed authorizations so that one would be valid at execution.

Binance estimated the loss to be about $6.3 billion, while Elliptic called it the biggest theft of its kind, estimating the loss at $6.43 billion.

According to Cryptopolitan, the FBI also requested THORChain node operators and other DeFi services to block wallets associated with the stolen funds. The list includes 608 Ethereum addresses, 19 Bitcoin addresses, and a single Solana address.

Analyst SomaXBT estimated that about $242 million moved through Tron in two days. About $140 million of it was funneled through cross-chain services like Relay, THORChain, Chainflip and Symbiosis.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence said last week that North Korean groups were targeting crypto exchanges.

Binance has frozen about $3 billion of stolen funds. On November 2, it said it had funded about 95% of the amount involved from its own pocket.