North Korea is in a hurry to make money...Hackers only appeared at the Reconnaissance General Bureau? [Y Record]

North Korea Sanctions North Korea Stole Virtual Currency from Upbeat 5 Years ago
Hacking Ethereum's Market Price of 1.4 Trillion vs.
North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau Behind the Hacking...3,000 hackers alone
About 3 million won a North Korean soldier's monthly salary...Deploying troops to earn foreign currency?

■ Host: Anchor Yoon Jae-hee
■ Starring: Former Vice Unification Minister Kim Hyung-seok

* The text below may differ from the actual broadcast content, so please check the broadcast for more accurate information. Please specify [YTN24] when quoting.


◇anchor> Anyway, wouldn't it cost a lot of money for North Korea to do something like this? So I looked at where the funds came from, and there was a lot of money stolen. It was revealed for the first time that Korea's cryptocurrency exchange Upbit was hacked five years ago, and it is understood that the Reconnaissance General Bureau is behind it. What kind of place is it?

◆ Kim Hyung-seok> The Reconnaissance General Bureau literally sends spies and collects information, but basically, the pattern of war is now in the Ukraine war, and there is also a conventional war.Don't you do a lot of cyberattacks? So we train a lot of fighters in cyber, the Reconnaissance General Bureau. So there are many cases where the warriors go into the so-called hacking, the so-called cyber world that you just talked about, and illegally steal it. So the Reconnaissance General Bureau is basically a special North Korean organization that collects information and does something that puts the other person in danger in an irregular way that threatens them.

◇ Anchor> The biggest reason for hacking even the cryptocurrency exchange is that the money line has dried up due to sanctions against North Korea, so should we actually consider the economic situation in North Korea to be serious?

◆Kim Hyung-seok> North Korea is basically not transparent. So I don't know. For example, the international community's sanctions on North Korea began in earnest in 2016. So, in general, North Korea's exports were controlled in large areas. At that time, trade between North Korea and China was about $7 billion. However, as of the end of 2022, after full-fledged sanctions, the annual trade between North Korea and China is less than $700 million. So it's decreased by one-tenth. It's not the entire North Korean economy, but you can see one such trend, trend, and the other is that the exchange rate was usually about 8,000 won, but now it's about 18,000 won. Then, the exchange rate itself leads to a shortage of supplies, which can be symbolized in that way, so in that sense, the North Korean economy has shrunk to about a tenth in a very extreme way. But now we're going up a little bit because of the speciality of the war in Ukraine.

◇ Anchor> The dispatch of North Korean troops to Russia is also linked to the economic aspect, right?

◆ Kim Hyung-seok > That's right. So according to what's known now, isn't it about 2,000 dollars per month? Then, 10,000 troops were dispatched. Then it's 220 million dollars a year. So it's not a small amount of money.



Excerpted from the conversation: Lee Mi-young, editor of the digital news team

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