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 fraction eventually become hackers in an investment that has paid off dramatically, as the group has evolved from the early days when it ran illegal gambling websites to pulling off the world’s biggest cyber heist last month.