YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Blockchain intelligence firms link North Korea to $6.3B hack on Binance

81 points paulpauper 2 hours ago 22 comments

ChrisArchitect 57 minutes ago | parent

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50300853

ilamont 55 minutes ago | parent

A question: how come the North Koreans aren't draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash using equally sophisticated exploits against known technical and human vulnerabilities?

hungryhobbit 53 minutes ago | parent

They are trying!

ktm5j 18 minutes ago | parent

They probably are. I used to write software for a financial institution and we saw a lot of traffic from Chinese and Russian IP's hitting our firewalls constantly (ssh login attempts with typical default passwords, random wordpress exploits, that sorta thing). It wasn't very sophisticated so I don't think it was state sponsored or anything, probably just random cyber criminals trying to hit US targets because their governments wouldn't care.

method_capital 7 minutes ago | parent

Do they really need to bother? Plenty to steal in cryptoland, and it's much much easier.

gejose 51 minutes ago | parent

Probably because fiat, unlike crypto, is not decentralized and fraudulent transactions can be reversed. A North Korean hacker zeroing out an account balance and incrementing another, can be reversed.

10111001 43 minutes ago | parent

Exactly. It turns out a lot of the things in the banking system that cryptocurrency people complain about are actually features, not bugs.

IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.

method_capital 8 minutes ago | parent

Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency. It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources. Current form, however, has devolved into casino gambling and criminal laundering.

I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.

logicchains 31 minutes ago | parent

>"draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash"

Cash sits in vaults. North Korea would need to physically send a team of bank robbers to extract it. The digital representation of USD is not cash, it's an entry in a ledger, and banks generally have systems that would not allow adding an entry with a sudden transfer of a large amount of money to "J. U. Kim, North Korea". That's why Bitcoin is called "digital cash".

nphardon 28 minutes ago | parent

They do, here's one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery

I think Darknet Diaries covers a bunch of these types of heists involving banks.

I suspect they just assess vulnerabilities and exploit them when/where they can. My understanding is that these thefts are big part of their (NK) economy.

postalcoder 24 minutes ago | parent

They have! There was a famous incident in 2016 where NK tried to wire a billion dollars out of the NY fed and managed to get away with $100 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery

echoangle 3 minutes ago | parent

Other question: why don’t they just forge currency? Surely with nation states resources you can create fake currency that easily fools most inspections? Is it that hard to launder cash? Or is the a red line and they are afraid of political measures?

There’s Superdollars but it doesn’t seem to be a really widespread problem so far, right?

sandeepkd 52 minutes ago | parent

At this point it feels like they have made it a /dev/null for things which are not easy to resolve and one is still on the hook to provide some answers

nusoone 51 minutes ago | parent

Glad binance is posting updates directly on X so we don’t have to read propaganda

ram1500natrluvr 36 minutes ago | parent

What kind of updates are they posting on X and what is the propaganda?

nusoone 35 minutes ago | parent

The usual

mcmcmc 28 minutes ago | parent

Since when is X anything other than propaganda and porn

asftq 17 minutes ago | parent

I didn't know there were Effective Altruists in North Korea. Will they do AI data centers next to increase NK's popularity?

ano-ther 2 minutes ago | parent

Here is the underlying report from TRM: https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/north-korea-steals-us...