Dan Guido on North Korea
From Dan Guido, Trail of Bits · · The Archive: Crypto, Startups, and Stories
“I am truly impressed with what North Korea's been able to pull off. um they are like normally uh from countries like that you're seeing people recycle pentesting tools using off-the-shelf exploits and techniques that are well understood. And what you see from North Korea is they are performing intrusions. They are assessing the environment that they have access to and on the fly writing novel tools to take advantage of it. Um they're they're writing like smart contract code. They're writing um malware. They're writing like they they're they're doing things that are really quite sophisticated.”
On , Dan Guido, CEO at Trail of Bits, spoke about North Korea during Dan Guido, Trail of Bits on The Archive: Crypto, Startups, and Stories.
About Dan Guido
In an April 2025 podcast appearance, Dan Guido, co-founder and CEO of Trail of Bits, discussed his background in security research, the threat posed by North Korean hackers, and the relationship between AI and cybersecurity. He stated that the insecurity of blockchain protocols is "funding nukes in North Korea," noting that North Korea's annual GDP is roughly $25 billion and that it steals an estimated $1 to 2 billion per year. Guido expressed admiration for North Korea's hacking capabilities, saying they write novel tools on the fly and develop custom smart contract code, unlike other state-sponsored groups that recycle off-the-shelf exploits. He also said that AI-powered bug-finding is not new, noting that Trail of Bits won a DARPA AI cyber challenge in 2024 and that "15 or 20 bug finding systems using AI" already existed at that time. Guido said that only a small number of companies are likely to be targeted by adversaries with zero-day exploits, and that most breaches result from password reuse, misconfigurations, and social engineering. He described Trail of Bits as a "learning system" that ensures individual insights are shared across the organization. Regarding the future of AI in security, he stated that the opportunity for defense using AI is "way bigger than offense," because AI is well-suited for pattern matching against a company's structured data to find latent security issues.