FBI blames North Korea for Binance attack, Trump holds back

The FBI has attributed a large-scale cyberattack against Binance, one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange platforms, to North Korean authorities. The attribution comes from the US investigative agency, which identifies Pyongyang as responsible for the operation, according to what was reported by Izvestia.

The FBI’s reconstruction, however, did not find full support within the US administration. US President Donald Trump cast doubt on the agency’s conclusions regarding North Korean involvement, introducing an element of political friction around an investigation that, in international practice, is often used as the basis for sanctions or diplomatic actions against Pyongyang. The gap between the agency’s technical finding and the position of the head of the executive branch remains, at this time, unresolved in the available sources.

On the corporate side, Binance stated that it had reimbursed ninety percent of the assets stolen in the attack, according to a company statement cited by ANSA. This is a partial figure: the available sources do not specify how the reimbursement took place or the nature of the remaining share that has not yet been recovered.

The episode fits into a recurring pattern in international cybersecurity, that of attacks on cryptocurrency platforms attributed to groups linked to North Korea, a sector that for years has been identified by several Western agencies as a source of funding for the Pyongyang regime. The distinctive feature of this case is the public divergence between the FBI’s finding and the US president’s judgment, a misalignment that has no direct precedent in the sources examined here and that leaves open the question of which version will guide Washington’s eventual diplomatic or sanctions-related response.

The two available sources — the FBI statement cited by Izvestia and the Binance statement cited by ANSA — cover distinct and non-overlapping aspects of the episode: the attribution of the attack on one hand, the extent of the funds’ recovery on the other. No further independent confirmations regarding the authorship of the attack have emerged at this time, nor technical details on how the intrusion was carried out. It therefore remains established, on the basis of the available sources, that the FBI has formalized a state attribution and that Binance has stated it has recovered ninety percent of the stolen assets, while the White House’s position on this attribution does not converge with that of the investigative agency.