1/ While the world has been worrying about North Korean nuclear weapons, Kim Jong-un’s Reconnaissance General Bureau (its CIA) has been training its hackers to rob the world’s financial institutions. @pwinn5 has that story for @pritheworld and @globalpost s.pri.org/ZQfizCe
2/ Want to know what the RGB’s hackers do? Let’s go back to February 2016. That’s when North Korean hackers pulled off one of the greatest heists in US history, all without setting foot on American soil. The target: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
3/ The Federal Reserve holds the world’s largest repository of gold in vaults 80 feet below ground. But it also holds vast foreign wealth on servers wired up to the internet. That’s what North Korean hackers targeted: about $1 billion in a Fed-run account belonging to Bangladesh.
4/ First, they hacked the Bangladesh Central Bank. Then they sent a flurry of phony transfer requests into accounts managed by the thieves overseas, mostly in the Philippines. Before anybody noticed, they’d stolen $81 million.
5/ The Federal Reserve heist was just one of hundreds of attacks North Korean hackers have launched on global financial institutions in recent years. They’ve successfully pilfered $650 million from banks and cryptocurrency exchanges in 30 countries. That we know of.
6/ As for the money, it helps the North Korean state satisfy its needs, large and small, benevolent and crooked — from supporting the nuclear program to, according to one expert, buying luxury goods for top leaders’ mistresses.
7/ @pwinn5 tried to make sense of these hackers. So he tracked down two North Korean defectors living in Seoul with ties to the RGB’s computer army.
8/ The first, Kim Heung-Kwang, spent years as a computer science professor teaching many students who then joined the RGB hacker corps. Kim described some of the structure and strategy of the groups, and Kim Jong-un’s investment in cybercrime.
9/ “You want to rank countries when it comes to government hacking?” Kim asks. “Well, most people will say America is No. 1, Russia is No. 2, China is No. 3 and so on. But tell me, honestly. Is anyone pulling off as many successful hacking operations as North Korea?”
10/ The second defector, Jang Seyul, is a cyberexpert who ran battle simulation programs at the RGB. He described the things that motivate and also constrain elite hackers. They receive prestige and benefits for themselves and their families.
11/ “Boys and men dream of pursuing this path,” Jang says. But the benefits come with risks. “These apartments for the wealthy [in Pyongyang], they are under strict observation. So the hacker’s family are like hostages in a sense.”
12/ The hacker army now matters globally for reasons other than that its threat to global finance. North Korea’s relationship to the world seems to be in flux. Kim Jong-un recently met his South Korean counterpart. s.pri.org/xJ7ktZQ
14/ A regime that recently fantasized about bombing Washington, DC, into “ashes and darkness” now speaks vaguely of “denuclearization.” s.pri.org/49OIVKS
15/ We hear a great deal about North Korean nukes, but how will the RGB’s hacker army fit into talks? Will Kim Jong-un bring them to heel in exchange for sanctions relief? Will he unleash them more boldly if talks go poorly? Will he walk away from the table altogether?
16/ Nobody knows the answers to those questions. But thanks to @pwinn5, we know a lot more about North Korea’s hacker elite and the regime they serve. s.pri.org/3ZbNPPX
17/ Tune in to @pritheworld Wednesday and Thursday to hear the radio version of this story. We will add audio to this thread as it becomes available.
