NORTH KOREA’S KIM YO-JONG DENIES ROLE IN RECORD $6.3 BILLION BINANCE HACK, HINTS TRUMP TO BLAME
Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and a top regime official, has rejected U.S. claims that Pyongyang orchestrated the largest cryptocurrency theft in history. In a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, she branded the FBI’s attribution of the October 29, 2026, Binance heist “a grave political provocation” and “absurd rhetoric.”
The attack drained roughly $6.3 billion from Binance hot wallets across multiple blockchains in about 20 minutes. The FBI linked the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group previously tied to the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in 2025. Blockchain analysis firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis reached the same conclusion based on on-chain and off-chain patterns. Binance has said it will cover the losses with company funds and has already replaced the bulk of the stolen assets.
Kim accused Washington of trying to brand the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a “cyber criminal state.” She said the U.S. “misleads the international public opinion as if all the cyber crimes in different parts of the world are our deeds.” She also suggested the Trump administration itself could be behind the theft, noting that it announced plans to confiscate illegally obtained cryptocurrency and hold it in a strategic reserve. “Anyone who looks at who will end up with the so-called stolen cryptocurrency once it is retrieved may get a clue about who is behind the hacking incident,” she said
The denial follows a familiar pattern. North Korea has repeatedly rejected responsibility for major crypto heists even as U.S. agencies and private investigators document the regime’s use of state-backed hackers to generate hard currency for its nuclear and missile programs under heavy sanctions.
Kim’s attempt to flip the script onto the U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve does not hold up. That reserve is built from assets already seized through criminal forfeiture proceedings, not from thefts staged by Washington. The FBI’s public alert and the independent work of multiple tracing firms leave little room for the regime’s standard denials.
Pyongyang has every incentive to keep the money and the deniability. American investigators and the blockchain record say otherwise.
Sources: Yonhap News Agency; Korean Central News Agency statements as reported by Yonhap and others; FBI public attribution; TRM Labs and Chainalysis analyses; Reuters reporting on Binance’s response; White House fact sheet on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.