Kenneth Glad
When masked thieves held up banks in the past, they needed fast cars and loaded weapons. Today, the largest robberies happen in total silence. The perpetrators sit thousands of miles away, and they never even break a sweat.
In late October, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance lost $6.36 billion in a mere 20 minutes. It stands as the largest digital robbery ever recorded. The FBI and analysts at TRM Labs quickly pointed to North Korea and its TraderTraitor hacking unit.
Other tracking firms like Chainalysis and Elliptic backed up this claim. Pyongyang regularly denies running state-sponsored cyber warfare. Yet, authorities have tied North Korean hackers to massive past thefts, including a $1.5 billion hit on Bybit in 2025, according to The Conversation.
These digital raids do not happen by accident. The country started laying the groundwork for its technological infrastructure back in the 1980s. Years later, leaders made computer classes mandatory for all young students.
Raised to crack codes
The regime identifies talented children early. Students with a gift for math and science go to elite schools in the capital for specialized training. From there, they move into military-linked university programs.
Reports from 2024 suggest North Korea had trained roughly 8,400 cyber specialists. Early operations focused on causing pure chaos. The DarkSeoul attack in 2013 and the global WannaCry virus in 2017 aimed to paralyze systems and spread public fear.
Now, the mission has shifted toward strict financial gain. Decades of heavy international sanctions have squeezed the country dry, leaving the leadership desperate for cash. Hackers step in to fill that void.
Funding a nuclear future
By 2024, digital operations accounted for roughly 50 percent of the foreign currency flowing into North Korea, based on estimates from a United Nations expert panel.
The stakes are incredibly high. One unnamed panel member stated that the stolen cash funds “40% of the weapons of mass destruction programs” in the country.
Stopping these strikes remains extremely difficult. Investigators struggle to trace missing funds across fractured international borders. Global law enforcement cannot simply enter another jurisdiction to seize servers or demand data without explicit permission.
Governments and private companies are trying to share more information. They want to block North Korean tech workers from using fake identities to infiltrate sensitive financial networks, but until global defenses improve, the billion-dollar digital heists will likely continue.
