How North Korea turns child prodigies into crypto thieves

AI Summary

North Korea has reportedly recruited gifted middle-school students into a long-running programme to train elite hackers, rewarding successful operatives with housing and cash. The article describes cyber theft as part of the country's state-backed hacking effort, including alleged cryptocurrency heists.

North Korea rewards ⁠its top hackers, tasked with heists like the Binance crypto hack that netted a cool US$6.3 ⁠billion, with perks such as spacious apartments in the capital and huge hard currency awards in return for ⁠gruelling hours of work. 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, defectors and analysts say. A...