YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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

81 points paulpauper 2 hours ago 19 comments

ChrisArchitect 55 minutes ago | parent

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

ilamont 53 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 51 minutes ago | parent

They are trying!

ktm5j 16 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.

gejose 49 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 41 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 6 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 29 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 26 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 22 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

sandeepkd 50 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 49 minutes ago | parent

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

ram1500natrluvr 34 minutes ago | parent

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

nusoone 33 minutes ago | parent

The usual

mcmcmc 25 minutes ago | parent

Since when is X anything other than propaganda and porn

asftq 15 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?