Half of North Korean missile program funded by cyberattacks and crypto theft, White House says

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Wash­ing­ton
CNN
 — 

About half of North Korea’s mis­sile pro­gram has been fund­ed by cyber­at­tacks and cryp­tocur­ren­cy theft, a White House offi­cial said Tuesday. 

A sweep­ing US fed­er­al gov­ern­ment effort is ongo­ing to under­stand how “a coun­try like [North Korea] is so darn cre­ative in this space,” Anne Neu­berg­er, deputy nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er for cyber and emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy, said at an event host­ed by the non­prof­it Spe­cial Com­pet­i­tive Stud­ies Project. 

US intel­li­gence agen­cies are work­ing to iden­ti­fy North Kore­an oper­a­tives and the Trea­sury is trac­ing stolen cryp­tocur­ren­cy, Neu­berg­er said, adding that the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is “putting a lot of time and thought” into the problem. 

It’s an esti­mate that sug­gests hack­ing and cyber­crime are key to the North Kore­an regime’s sur­vival. Neuberger’s com­ments come amid height­ened inter­na­tion­al con­cern over Pyongyang’s mis­sile and nuclear weapons pro­gram. A new inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­sile that North Korea test­ed in April could allow the regime to launch long-range nuclear strikes more quick­ly, CNN pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed.

The Jus­tice Depart­ment last month charged a North Kore­an man with an elab­o­rate mon­ey laun­der­ing scheme that tapped employ­ees of US cryp­tocur­ren­cy firms to help fund the North Kore­an regime. 

At a pub­lic event last July, Neu­berg­er said that the North Kore­ans “use cyber to gain, we esti­mate, up to a third of their funds to fund their mis­sile pro­gram.” A spokesper­son for Neu­berg­er told CNN on Wednes­day that the updat­ed fig­ure she cit­ed this week was accu­rate. That sug­gests that the issue has, if any­thing, only grown in impor­tance in the months since. 

North Kore­an hack­ers have stolen bil­lions of dol­lars from banks and cryp­tocur­ren­cy firms over the last sev­er­al years, pro­vid­ing a key source of rev­enue for the regime, accord­ing to reports from the Unit­ed Nations and pri­vate firms. US offi­cials have long sus­pect­ed that at least some of that mon­ey has been fuel­ing Pyongyang’s weapons devel­op­ment but have rarely spo­ken pub­licly in detail about the issue. 

A recent CNN inves­ti­ga­tion found a ram­pant effort by North Kore­an hack­ers to steal cryp­tocur­ren­cy and laun­der it into hard cash that might help fund dic­ta­tor Kim Jong Un’s weapons pro­grams. Anoth­er CNN inves­ti­ga­tion iden­ti­fied one cryp­tocur­ren­cy entre­pre­neur who said his firm had unwit­ting­ly sent a North Kore­an IT work­er tens of thou­sands of dollars. 

Such North Kore­an cyber activ­i­ty is part of reg­u­lar intel­li­gence prod­ucts pre­sent­ed to senior US offi­cials, some­times includ­ing Pres­i­dent Joe Biden, a senior US offi­cial pre­vi­ous­ly told CNN. 

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