Feds Offer $5 Million to Help Disrupt North Korean Hackers

The State Department’s Rewards for Justice program on Friday announced that it’s seeking information that leads to “the disruption of financial mechanisms of persons engaged in certain activities that support North Korea, including money laundering, exportation of luxury goods to North Korea, specified cyber-activity” and anything that supports the country’s weapons of mass destruction programs. On the cybersecurity front, for example, the program “is seeking information on those who seek to undermine cybersecurity, including financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges around the world, for the benefit of the government of North Korea,” which is based in Pyongyang. The program says it’s also interested in information pertaining to weapons sales and shipments, ship-to-ship transfers involving coal mined in North Korea or crude oil or petroleum being shipped to the country, the use of North Korean labor sent abroad to funnel money back to Pyongyang, money laundering, drugs and counterfeiting, the use of luxury goods, and human rights abuses.