North Korea’s elite hacker programme: Spacious Pyongyang flats and hard currency rewards for cyber heists

North Korea rewards top hackers with perks such as spacious apartments in Pyongyang and large hard currency awards, according to defectors. The programme, more than a decade old, selects 200 of the smartest middle-school students each year to become elite cyber operatives who carried out the Binance

SEOUL — North Korea rewards its top hackers, tasked with heists such as the Binance crypto hack that netted US$6.3 billion, with perks including a spacious apartment in the capital of Pyongyang and huge hard currency awards, despite gruelling hours of work, defectors and analysts say.

Leader Kim Jong Un has assembled an army of world-class hackers using such incentives in a programme more than a decade old that picks 200 of the smartest middle school students each year to study computer engineering. A fraction eventually become hackers in an investment that has paid off dramatically, as the group has evolved from running illegal gambling websites to pulling off the world’s biggest cyber heist last month.

“They are actually one of Kim Jong Un’s secret weapons,” said Kim Heung-kwang, a North Korean defector who trained hackers on behalf of the state before fleeing to South Korea in 2004. “There is no other country grooming hackers like this, systematically searching for the smartest children, solely to turn them into operatives. Whether they want to be a hacker or not does not matter.”

Candidate selection begins in middle school as early as 11 or 12 years of age, with authorities picking about 150 to 200 children a year to study computer science, said Kim Heung-kwang and two defectors who worked in IT. At 17, the top performers are sent to North Korea’s best universities and undergo further screening before a chosen few enter the military’s cyber unit as hackers. Successful exploits can earn as much as 30 per cent of the heist’s profits in US dollars for the hackers’ military unit, and they can even receive a flat in the capital where their parents can also stay, Mr Kim said.

“There are accounts that successful cyber personnel are given apartments in Pyongyang,” said Lim Jongin, professor emeritus at the school of cybersecurity at Korea University, adding that the flats could range to as much as 132 sq m (1,420 sq ft). Such performers are also eligible for membership of the ruling party and high-status marriages into elite families, said one of the defectors.

North Korea set up a cyber unit in 1998 but elevated its status after Kim came to power and declared in 2013 that cyber warfare was, along with nuclear weapons and missiles, an “all purpose sword” crucial to the country’s strike capability. The North’s cyberwarfare operations employ about 8,400 people, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service estimated in 2024.

State backing makes the North’s hackers more dangerous and harder to repulse, as they face no consequences for hack after hack, enabling them to perfect their strategies, analysts said. “In the world of cyber crime, often, if you make a mistake … that is all law enforcement needs to get you,” said Alec Zebrick, senior manager for Asia-Pacific global services at Chainalysis. “But North Korea’s hackers are doing this for the regime, so they’re going to continue, even after successes. Even after failures, they’ll continue, because it’s very hard for the international community to take action against them.”