Reuters Exposes North Korea's Hacker Training System: Indoctrination-style Training from Age Eleven, Up to 30% of Funds Shared as Spoils upon Successful Operations

BlockBeats news, November 6 - According to Reuters, North Korean defectors and analysts say that North Korea has built a "world-class" hacker force through more than a decade of incentive and selection systems, considered one of its "secret weapons"; the FBI and Binance have accused the North Korea-linked group TraderTraitor of being responsible for the theft of approximately $6.3 billion from Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency trading platform, last month, and Pyongyang denies it.

The report says that selection can start as early as the middle school stage at ages eleven or twelve, with authorities annually picking about 150 to 200 top students to study computing; after age 17, the best enter top universities for further screening, and a small number join the military cyber force, with training including cryptocurrency protocols, reverse engineering, and more; those not selected as hackers are mostly trained to remotely write software for Western companies. Successful operations can allow the affiliated unit to receive up to about 30% of the stolen US dollar funds, and may lead to benefits such as housing in Pyongyang and arranged marriages. South Korea's National Intelligence Service estimated in 2024 that North Korea has about 8,400 personnel related to cyber warfare. Binance says attackers infiltrated employees' computers through fake interviews and ad-embedded software, then used internal AI tools to seize control of the system.