North Korea Denies $6.3B Binance Hack, Calls FBI Finding a 'Political Provocation'

In brief

• North Korea has denied it was behind the hack of Binance, with Kim Yo Jong calling U.S. accusations a "sinister" attempt to damage the country's image.
• The FBI, the Secret Service and blockchain analytics firms have attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, the North Korean group blamed for the Bybit hack.
• Binance said net withdrawals since Sunday reached $4.72 billion, but that hourly deposits began exceeding withdrawals late on Monday.

North Korea has rejected U.S. findings that it was behind the record hack of Binance, calling the FBI's attribution a "grave political provocation," Yonhap reported on Tuesday.

"It is a grave political provocation against the DPRK that the U.S. misleads the international public opinion as if all the cyber crimes in different parts of the world are our deeds," Kim Yo Jong, the sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency. She called the accusation a "sinister" attempt to damage North Korea's international image.

Kim also turned the blame back on Washington, pointing to the Trump administration's plan to use confiscated crypto as a strategic reserve. Anyone who looks at who will end up with "the so-called stolen cryptocurrency" once it is retrieved "may get a clue about who is behind the hacking incident," she said.