North Korea deploys AI in cyberattacks: Report

North Korean state-backed hackers are increasingly harnessing artificial intelligence to sharpen cyberattacks against military, diplomatic and academic targets, according to a report from South Korean cybersecurity firm Genians cited by Al Jazeera on Tuesday.

The report identifies Kimsuky, a hacking collective linked to North Korea's intelligence apparatus, as having deployed AI in spear-phishing campaigns against specific individuals and institutions since 2016, generating convincing forged documents disguised as research papers and invitation letters. To evade detection, Genians found, the group has turned to open-source tools such as Ollama, GPT4All and MSTY to run large language models offline, without an internet connection -- allowing AI-crafted decoys to be produced quickly and with a level of polish that makes them significantly harder to distinguish from genuine correspondence.

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Kimsuky and other North Korean hacking groups have been blamed for numerous cyberattacks in recent years, many pursued for financial gain; British blockchain analytics firm Elliptic has estimated that North Korean hackers stole more than $2 billion in cryptocurrency during the first nine months of 2025 alone. Pyongyang has a long history of state-linked cyber operations, including the 2014 Sony Pictures hack the US attributed to North Korean anger over the film The Interview's satirical depiction of leader Kim Jong Un -- and the Genians findings arrive amid mounting global concern that AI is making state-sponsored cyber campaigns faster, more polished, and harder to detect.