Kim Yo Jong Rejects FBI Blame in the Binance Hack

Kim Yo Jong, a senior official of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party, rejected the FBI's finding that North Korean hackers stole more than $6 billion from Binance, and suggested the international community should look at who ends up with the crypto once it is recovered. The statement, released Nov. 2 through the Korean Central News Agency, was Pyongyang's first comment on the incident, according to South Korean broadcaster SBS.

The FBI said on Oct. 31 that North Korea was responsible for the theft of more than $6 billion from Binance on or about Oct. 29, an activity it names TraderTraitor. Kim called the U.S. position "an absurd rhetoric and nothing new" and said blaming her country for cyber crimes worldwide was a "grave political provocation," Unchained reported. Cointelegraph quoted the statement as saying the FBI is trying to brand the DPRK a "cyber criminal state" based on claimed information about a supported hacking organization, and added that "this is not the first time that the U.S. has attempted to spread misunderstanding of the DPRK in the international community."

Her argument about recovered funds points at the Trump administration's March 6, 2025 executive order establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. That order capitalizes the reserve with bitcoin the government has forfeited in criminal or civil proceedings, and it lets the attorney general or another agency head return forfeited assets to "identifiable and verifiable victims of crime" instead of holding them, Unchained noted. Other forfeited tokens, including ether, go to a separate Digital Asset Stockpile under the same order, and the FBI says the hackers converted most of the stolen funds into ether. Kim urged the international community to recall that the administration announced soon after taking office that it would seize stolen crypto and keep it as a strategic reserve.

"If it carefully examines who will get the large amount of the so-called stolen cryptocurrency when the latter is retrieved, it may get a clue about who is behind the hacking incident," Kim said, as quoted by Cointelegraph. The statement offered no evidence for that suggestion and did not mention the onchain tracing by TRM Labs and Chainalysis that preceded the FBI's alert, Unchained reported.

Kim also said the U.S. "tried to blame the DPRK" last year for the Bybit hack. The FBI attributed that roughly $1.5 billion theft to North Korea in February 2025, tying it to the same group, and Kim rejected that accusation on Tuesday as well. She described the allegations as a political provocation intended to damage North Korea's international standing, Cointelegraph reported.

The investigators' case had been public before the FBI published its alert. TRM Labs tied the attack to TraderTraitor with high confidence using onchain and offchain intelligence, while Chainalysis and ZachXBT also linked the theft to North Korean hackers. TRM described advance preparation, Tornado Cash funding for attacker wallets and coordinated use of previously obtained transaction signatures as shared with earlier North Korean operations, though it said the laundering that followed differed from the Bybit hack. ZachXBT found that proceeds from the Binance and Bitget attacks were later commingled at the same address after passing through THORChain.

The statement closed with Kim saying Pyongyang is "closely monitoring" U.S. moves against it and has "issues to reconsider in diverse aspects" without naming them. She referred to the incident as an "extra-large-scale incident" and said the United States had "once again engaged in a habitual provocation by linking it to us," SBS reported. SBS also noted it is somewhat unusual for Kim, who oversees foreign policy toward the United States and South Korea, to respond to a hacking incident rather than the Foreign Ministry, and that she did not say what the issues to reconsider were. The same report said her remarks are interpreted locally as a hint that the incident could weigh on North Korea-U.S. dialogue.