Sometimes missed on North Korea’s voluminous list of human rights abuses are its serial cyber kleptomania and global criminal schemes to rip off the world’s financial systems. Just days ago, we got a grim reminder of the massive cyberthreat it poses to global finance.
A federal indictment unsealed recently charged three North Korean computer programmers with criminal conspiracy to steal and extort more than $1.3 billion of money and cryptocurrency from financial institutions and companies, even to the point of using malicious cryptocurrency applications and systems to defraud.
In a second case, a Canadian-American citizen agreed to plead guilty as a money launderer for several criminal schemes, including a North Korea-orchestrated cyber bank heist.
There is a method to North Korea’s cyberattacks. Effectively blocked from most traditional global financial channels and with a gross domestic product of about $18 billion, roughly half the economic output of Vermont, is in perpetual search of money. Said Acting U.S. Attorney Tracy Wilkison for the Central District of California: “The conduct detailed in the indictment are the acts of a criminal nation-state that has stopped at nothing to extract revenge and obtain money to prop up its regime.”
That’s another way of saying that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s ruthless regime, sometimes dubbed the Sopranos State, is financially fragile, and in many ways, desperate. Without the Kim family’s dynastic myth that only a Kim can lead the country, brutal oppression backed by a massive military and strategic isolation of its impoverished citizens from foreign influences, North Korea would be a completely collapsed state.
This is the reason political opponents are brutally executed or sentenced to hard labor camps until they succumb to starvation and malnutrition. And why young girls are sold for sex or labor globally. And why threats of nuclear missile confrontation with the United States and South Korea are used to project the totalitarian regime’s illusion of strength to its people.
The federal takedown is crucial, but federal agents have the daunting task to stay on top of North Korea’s cyber kleptomania, which requires close cooperation of the private sector, governments, and financial and law enforcement organizations across national boundaries. Cybercrimes can be launched inside or outside of North Korea and the vastness of the internet requires a high level of sophistication to track or block. A big illicit haul can offset the impact of traditional sanctions, and finance Kim’s missile and nuclear weapons programs.
The Biden administration must confront North Korea on nuclear and missile programs, economic dysfunction and human rights atrocities. U.S. policymakers also must prioritize countering North Korea’s state-sponsored criminality, especially the work of its cybercriminals. This linchpin to the regime’s survival, if unchecked, will continue to exploit vulnerabilities in cybersecurity and capitalism to the world’s detriment.
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