Press Statement by Spokesperson for the National Coordination Committee for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

 The anti-DPRK plot by the United States is now extending even to the cyber area.

On August 26, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Department of the Treasury, Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Cyber Command argued that a hacking group called “BeagleBoyz” is linked with our country and announced what they call a joint technical alert, thus having incited pressure against the DPRK.

And on August 27, the U.S. Department of Justice made a forfeiture complaint by forcibly linking cyber-crime to the DPRK without any evidence, and again on August 28, the U.S. State Department came forward to make a statement of welcoming the joint technical alert.

Further serious is that the U.S. is circulating preposterous rumors that these “criminal acts” were committed under the assistance of the DPRK.

It is the consistent position of the government of the DPRK to oppose every form and shape of criminal acts in cyberspace, and the integrated and consolidated legal and institutional mechanisms are put in place in our country in order to prevent and eradicate cyber-crime of all forms and manifestations.

Nevertheless, the U.S. is making “cyber threat” of the DPRK a fait accompli and making much ado, calling for joint response and so on. All these reveal its sinister intention to tarnish the external image of the DPRK and to justify its move for an international pressure against the DPRK.

It is indeed the height of shamelessness and absurdity that the words of “cyber threat” are uttered by the United States – a mastermind of cyber-crime, who possesses the world’s largest cyber-war force and abuses the internet space to furiously conduct cyber-wars against whatever the countries, without distinguishing between its enemy and its ally.

It is widely known to the world that the U.S. has a notorious large-size intelligence institution called the National Security Agency which receives an astronomical amount of budget from the Congress and specializes in indiscriminate surveillance, wiretapping and disrupting of the internet space, telecommunication networks and financial systems all over the world.

According to the testimony of Snowden, former U.S. intelligence agent, the National Security Agency launches more than 61,000 hacking operations of all kinds throughout the world under an internet surveillance plan called “Prism.” The NSA is also said to collect approximately 5 billion records of mobile phones on a daily basis by tapping the phones of almost all countries including our country, and it even taps the mobile phones of the leaders of its allies.

It is a fact admitted even by the U.S. judicial authority that the sensational incident of the U.S. in July, where the celebrities had been hacked, was committed by a 17-year-old hacker living in Florida.

Nowadays, banking institutions of several countries are suffering tremendous losses from a large-scale cyber-attack, and it should be duly doubted if it has been done by the U.S., which is now bogged down in a serious economic crisis.

Such being the case, the forced linkage by the U.S. of our country with “cyber-crime” is nothing but the stereotyped method employed by the U.S. in order to dilute the criticism directed against it. No countries will be duped any further by such conspiratorial propaganda.

The U.S. should better exercise self-restraint, bearing in mind that provoking us would bring about a direr consequence.