How North Korean hackers become the most merciless bank robbers in the world
The Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea's equivalent to the CIA, has trained the world's top bank robbery teams. In the previous three years, RGB hackers have targeted more than 100 banks and cryptocurrency exchanges throughout the world, taking more than $650 million. That is something we are aware of.
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Students from Pyongyang's renowned Mangyongdae Revolutionary School. North Korea's top hackers are routinely transferred to countries with faster internet bandwidth to target banks throughout the world. They have targeted Wells Fargo, Citibank, and the New York Federal Reserve in the United States. (Photo courtesy of KCNA)
Even though it was one of the greatest bank robberies in history, the criminals never set foot on American soil.
They didn't even target a traditional bank. They established an account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a very safe institution.
In vaults 80 feet below Manhattan's streets, the bank boasts the world's largest gold repository. Many of these gold bars are owned by foreign governments that believe that putting their gold in America's well-defended bunkers is safer than holding it at home.
Foreign countries, too, deposit funds with the Fed. However, this is cash in the twenty-first century: all ones and zeroes, not smudgy bills. The bank's vast overseas riches is kept on humming servers connected to the internet.
The crooks set out in February 2016 to steal approximately $1 billion from a Fed-run account. Bangladesh was the owner of this account. The hackers waited until Friday, a day off in many Muslim-majority nations, including Bangladesh, after getting into the Bangladesh Central Bank's computers.
They then started draining the account.
The hackers, posing as Bangladesh Central Bank officials, emailed the Fed a flurry of false transfer requests totaling more than $1 billion. The Fed began zapping money into the accounts of the thieves abroad, the vast majority of whom were based in the Philippines. Many of the funds were quickly paid out or laundered through casinos.
Following that, the trail becomes bleak.
The hackers did not receive the whole billion bucks that they sought. The vast majority of bogus requests were detected and cancelled by suspicious employees. They did, however, end up with an astounding $81 million score.
This heist's perpetrators are members of one of the world's most powerful organised criminal syndicates. They don't work for the Triads, the Sinaloa Cartel, or the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. They are employed by the Reconnaissance General Bureau (or RGB), which is headquartered in Pyongyang. This is North Korea's equivalent to the CIA.
North Korea's RGB, like the CIA, is immersed in clandestine foreign plots: killings, kidnappings, and copious monitoring. However, it is most likely best understood as a cross between the CIA, the KGB, and the Yakuza.
What distinguishes the bureau is its entrepreneurial streak, which has a distinctively criminal bent.
For decades, North Korea has been subjected to Western sanctions and has been barred from global markets. As a result, the regime has been compelled to seek funds in murkier areas where the law does not apply. This has included heroin manufacture, the production of counterfeit $100 bills, and the counterfeiting of name-brand cigarettes.
However, hacking has far surpassed any of previous swindles. The bureau has trained the best bank robbery teams in the world, as well as a network of hacking units capable of massive internet heists.
These thugs also have a significant advantage over other syndicates: they are confident they will never be charged. That's what happens when your own country backs your criminal misdeeds.
This is a new phenomenon, according to US intelligence officials. “A nation state robbing banks... that's important. “This is one-of-a-kind,” says Richard Ledgett. He was the deputy director of the National Security Agency until his recent retirement.
In recent years, North Korea has carried out attacks on more than 100 banks and internet exchanges in a total of 30 countries. It looks that the RGB was successful in stealing $650 million. That is something we are aware of.
Nonetheless, they are frequently ignored — at least in the American media, where Russian political hacking dominates the language of online deceit. If you didn't already know, North Korea committed a heist on the Federal Reserve in February 2016, while the media was preoccupied with the US presidential race to the exclusion of, well, almost everything else.
That focus has now switched to North Korea, and with reason.
North Korea recently vowed to hit the US with its "treasured nuclear sword of justice." It now makes large affectionate movements. American detainees have been released by Kim Jong-un. He has happily entered South Korea, if only for a short while, and is now ready to hold peace talks with President Donald Trump, who has threatened the young autocrat's life on Twitter. (Of course, anything might change in a second.) North Korea's leader cancelled talks with South Korea on joint US-Korea military drills on Wednesday and threatened to cancel his meeting with Trump.)
South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un shake hands at the Panmunjom truce village inside the demilitarised zone that separates the two Koreas, April 27, 2018, in South Korea. (Image courtesy of Reuters and the Korea Summit Press Pool.)
For the time being, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump have agreed to meet on June 12 in Singapore. This round, and any following rounds, will be centred on the fact that, against all odds, the leader of this penniless nation has secured humanity's most powerful creation: the hydrogen bomb.
This is something we are all aware of. Those with in-depth knowledge of North Korea's RGB, on the other hand, say the country has pulled off another incredible technological feat: assembling one of the world's most skilled hacking syndicates.
Furthermore, the state's nuclear arsenal is linked to these bank crimes. Sanctions are applied as a result of missile tests. North Korea's foreign currency reserves are depleted as a result of sanctions. Pyongyang is therefore compelled to look for alternative sources of income in the underworld. None of these criminal enterprises are as profitable as hacking, nor do they pose a greater threat to the world's financial system, which is dominated by the United States.
I enlisted the assistance of Kim Heung-Kwang, a bespectacled 58-year-old computer expert living in Seoul, to help me decipher North Korea's hacking exploits. Kim is familiar with Pyongyang's tech-savvy regime servants' thinking.
He used to be one of them.
Kim isn't easy to track down. That's the way he likes it.
Kim texted directions after they agreed to meet. Sona Jo, my co-producer, and I accompany them into a drab cement site on the outskirts of Seoul, far from the capital's glitzy shopping promenades. It's snowing lightly outside, and the unheated building is chilly. Kim's chambers are reached after a long journey up a frigid stairwell.
He happily answers the doorbell, "Come in!" he says in a sing-song tone, and instantly offers a cup of green tea. I braced myself for a nasty, slow-to-warm interaction on the way here. That sentiment pervaded several of my past discussions with North Korean defectors. After all, they were indoctrinated to despise Americans from birth.
“After all, you are jackals!” Kim reacts when I ask about his anti-American upbringing. He's laughing aloud, and his eyes are wrinkled as he smiles. “At the very least, that's what they say. Americans will always be our foe. The rulers of a contaminated empire.”
Kim, on the other hand, is friendly, with the demeanour of a gentle professor. I can't say the same for the other man in the room: a tall man in a dark coat who doesn't introduce himself but checks us over before retiring to a quiet corner. I make the decision not to inquire.
Kim Heung-Kwang is a computer network specialist who now leads a group of North Korean defectors with advanced degrees. (Image courtesy of Facebook.)
Kim has come a long way since emerging afraid, soaked, and almost destitute from the Tumen River in 2003. He snuck to the banks of the river that separates his country from China that year and bribed a North Korean guard. The soldier stepped aside as Kim swam through freezing waters into China. However, while swimming, Kim claims he was shot at by a second guard who he had failed to bribe.
He eventually made it over unscathed and travelled from China to South Korea. He now heads a group of North Korean defectors that are well educated.
He keeps himself busy by leading the North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity alliance, which is comprised of expatriate North Korean lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors, and programmers. North Korea's hackers are "an unbelievable treasure to Kim Jong-un," according to information he has gathered from these associates. “Because North Korean hackers are without a doubt the best in the world.”