Kim Yo Jong denies North Korea was behind the Binance hack: “absurd rhetoric, nothing new”

North Korea denied on Tuesday, November 3, that it is behind the cyberattack on Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, from which digital assets worth $6.3 billion were stolen. The reply came from Kim Yo Jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in a statement published by the state agency KCNA, describing the FBI’s accusation as a “serious political provocation” and “absurd rhetoric, nothing new”.

“It is not the first time the US has tried to cultivate misunderstandings about the DPRK in the international community, blindly linking it to ‘cybercrime’ incidents whenever they occur on an international scale,” Kim Yo Jong said, using the abbreviation of the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). She added that Pyongyang had once again confirmed Washington’s hostile stance, that it is closely watching the US “continued provocations” and that it now has “matters to reconsider in various fields”. In October Kim Yo Jong also threatened Seoul, announcing that psychological-warfare loudspeakers would operate along all the border.

What the FBI says about TraderTraitor

The attack took place on Thursday, October 29, and Binance announced it the next day. On Saturday, October 31, the FBI attributed the theft, which it estimates at more than $6 billion, to North Korea and specifically to a hacker group known as TraderTraitor. This is the same group that carried out the $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit exchange in 2025 and is considered part of the Lazarus Group. The FBI’s investigation showed the hackers mainly convert the loot into ethereum, and the FBI expects them to try to launder it through decentralised finance (DeFi) and instant-swap services. The agency asked exchanges and blockchain-analytics firms to block transactions tied to specific addresses.

TRM Labs also linked the attack to the same group and estimates that most of the money was moved within 20 minutes. “It is a bank robbery, in this case at the speed of the internet,” said the company’s head of policy Ari Redbord. Binance co-CEO Richard Teng described a “sophisticated attack” through a compromised laptop and malware that erases its traces. The company says it has already covered 90 per cent of the stolen funds from its own capital, having set aside about $6.34 billion, and gradually reopened withdrawals from Sunday, with new networks being added from Tuesday.

Trump: “We don’t know if it’s North Korea”

Asked by reporters at a Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump appeared more cautious than the FBI. “I’m not worried. We’re being briefed on it. We don’t know if it’s North Korea,” he said, leaving open the possibility that investigators will establish it. The US president has said he wants another meeting with Kim Jong Un, but Pyongyang has not responded, while on Tuesday it announced a test of a new cluster warhead for strategic cruise missiles. Analysts in Seoul told Reuters that the speed of the denial shows concern that Washington will move more harshly to cut off a source of funding believed to feed the country’s weapons programmes.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday that the North’s illicit cyber activities are a growing threat to the global digital economy. The blockchain-analytics firm Elliptic estimates that North Korea has stolen cryptocurrency worth $7.6 billion this year, more than in any other year. The country has been linked in the past to the 2014 Sony Pictures hack and the 2017 WannaCry malware, although it almost always denies involvement.