Alejandro Cao de Benós, Special Delegate for the North Korean Cultural Relations Committee, comments that the United States' accusation of being behind the WannaCry ransomware is a setup to tighten sanctions on the country and that everything is false.

Yesterday we echoed the information, in which the United States Government had said that the WannaCry ransomware had its origin in North Korea. Lately the country is in all the spotlights, related to cryptocurrencies, since from South Korea, they are also accused of attacking their cryptocurrency exchange houses in collaboration with the Government of China. All these accusations have not yet been validated with evidence, so they may or may not be true, but we have asked ourselves, what does North Korea have to say about all this?

North Korea is behind WannaCry, according to the United States

We intend to remain neutral before all the information that is presented, since international relations between countries are based on interests. We usually look for information about the data that comes to us, about countries that operate with cryptocurrencies or that want to ban them, to learn a little more about the reasons. Unfortunately, many times we do not receive an answer or as has happened to us when trying to contact different Ministries of Spain, they pass the buck and in the end we end up with nothing. North Korea, through Alejando Cao de Benós, Special Delegate for the Cultural Relations Committee, has been kind enough to respond to our email.

Cao de Benós tells us that Korea DPR has nothing to do with Lazarus malware and nothing to do with WannaCry. He has also highlighted to us that the accusations that come from South Korea, that it is their North Korean neighbors who attack the cryptocurrency exchange houses of the country, also flatly denies them, highlighting that they are used to 'justify additional sanctions and increase pressure international'

It highlights that the accusations from the United States refer to IP addresses that come from different countries and that could be related to North Korea, but, says Cao de Benós, that 'any user with a minimum of knowledge knows how to mask their IP' , which is true and on the web there are many applications and tutorials on how to do it. It also highlights to us that North Korean citizens have electricity, computers and also internet access.

The response also refers to the 2014 incident in which Sony's servers were attacked and several unreleased films, along with other material, were stolen. At that time, the United States also pointed to North Korean hacking groups, but security experts such as Kurt Stammberger of the cybersecurity company Norse, Marc Rogers , organizer of DEFCON and researcher at Cloudflare, and Kim Zetter , security journalist at Wired magazine, refuted this claim or emphasized that the accusations were very weak.

We reiterate that we are not running in defense of either party, we only present the arguments offered by North Korea, at the hands of Cao de Benós, who has been kind enough to answer us. Regarding cryptocurrencies, we always seek to know the position of governments or organizations and, as we have already mentioned, before the summer we contacted several Ministries and Regulatory Bodies in Spain and either they passed the buck between ministries or not even They replied, so we value that North Korea has responded to us.