Many people don’t understand: how can North Korea, a country where even the electricity supply is unreliable,
produce the world’s most formidable hacker army? ⚠️🤔
Cyberwarfare is one of the few arenas where North Korea can go toe-to-toe with major powers.
Names like Bureau 121 and Lazarus are notorious in security circles.
Precise, ruthless, and unconstrained.
The answer is chilling: the whole country is organized around it.
Their hackers aren’t self-taught; the state handpicks them from a young age.
At 11 or 12, kids who are good at math and quick thinkers get selected.
They leave their parents and go to a boarding school in Pyongyang to specialize in computing.
The best students go on to Kim Il Sung University or Pyongyang University of Automation.
According to defectors, they study for nine hours a day there.
There’s no entertainment at all.
They practice on real networks in South Korea, Europe, and the U.S.
After graduating, most are actually sent abroad.
Because the electricity and internet back home can’t be relied on…
Shenyang, Dalian, Russia, Southeast Asia.
Their public-facing identity is that of ordinary freelance programmers.
They take jobs from Western companies and write code for Web3 teams.
But under another identity, they’re attackers.
They exploit vulnerabilities they discover while working on those jobs.
Or pose as recruiters, luring key technical staff at crypto exchanges with high-paying offers.
The recent Binance incident used this same playbook.
Why crypto?
The banking system shut North Korea out long ago.
Money can neither come in nor go out.
On-chain, no one checks your identity, and no one can freeze funds with a single click.
That makes it the perfect cash machine for them.
Building a missile requires steel and foreign currency.
To raise a top-tier hacker,
all you need is an air-conditioned room, a few computers,
and an endless supply of instant coffee.
Once they pull it off, the profits can run into billions of dollars.
That’s half of the country’s actual foreign-currency income.
For them,
it’s the most profitable business in the entire country. #黑客 #朝鲜黑客 #币安
produce the world’s most formidable hacker army? ⚠️🤔
Cyberwarfare is one of the few arenas where North Korea can go toe-to-toe with major powers.
Names like Bureau 121 and Lazarus are notorious in security circles.
Precise, ruthless, and unconstrained.
The answer is chilling: the whole country is organized around it.
Their hackers aren’t self-taught; the state handpicks them from a young age.
At 11 or 12, kids who are good at math and quick thinkers get selected.
They leave their parents and go to a boarding school in Pyongyang to specialize in computing.
The best students go on to Kim Il Sung University or Pyongyang University of Automation.
According to defectors, they study for nine hours a day there.
There’s no entertainment at all.
They practice on real networks in South Korea, Europe, and the U.S.
After graduating, most are actually sent abroad.
Because the electricity and internet back home can’t be relied on…
Shenyang, Dalian, Russia, Southeast Asia.
Their public-facing identity is that of ordinary freelance programmers.
They take jobs from Western companies and write code for Web3 teams.
But under another identity, they’re attackers.
They exploit vulnerabilities they discover while working on those jobs.
Or pose as recruiters, luring key technical staff at crypto exchanges with high-paying offers.
The recent Binance incident used this same playbook.
Why crypto?
The banking system shut North Korea out long ago.
Money can neither come in nor go out.
On-chain, no one checks your identity, and no one can freeze funds with a single click.
That makes it the perfect cash machine for them.
Building a missile requires steel and foreign currency.
To raise a top-tier hacker,
all you need is an air-conditioned room, a few computers,
and an endless supply of instant coffee.
Once they pull it off, the profits can run into billions of dollars.
That’s half of the country’s actual foreign-currency income.
For them,
it’s the most profitable business in the entire country. #黑客 #朝鲜黑客 #币安
