BEIJING (Kyodo) — North Korea denied a U.S. accusation that it was involved in the theft of assets worth more than $6 billion from the Binance cryptocurrency exchange platform last week, state media reported Tuesday.

In a statement dated Monday, Kim Yo Jong, the sister of the country’s leader Kim Jong Un, dismissed the accusation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation as “absurd rhetoric” that is “nothing new,” according to the Korean Central News Agency.

“The FBI is trying to brand the DPRK as a ‘cyber criminal state,'” Kim Yo Jong said, describing it as a “grave political provocation” against the country. DPRK is the acronym for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“On this occasion, we confirmed Washington’s hostile attitude toward the DPRK once again,” said Kim, who serves as a department director of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea.

On Saturday, the FBI said North Korea was responsible for stealing more than $6 billion in virtual assets from Binance on or around Thursday, identifying a group it calls “TraderTraitor” as being behind the heist.

The FBI said it has seen TraderTraitor actors converting stolen assets into cryptocurrencies such as Ether. Expecting the assets will be put through “further laundering stages,” it asked relevant companies to block transactions linked to certain blockchain addresses.

“It is a grave political provocation against the DPRK that the U.S. misleads the international public opinion as if all the cyber crimes in different parts of the world are our deeds,” the sister said.

“We have issues to reconsider in diverse aspects as regards the very unpleasant U.S. hostile attitude,” she warned. Pyongyang has not responded to U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated calls for a resumption of summit diplomacy with the North Korean leader.

During his first term as president, Trump held three in-person talks with Kim in 2018 and 2019, but they failed to reach a deal on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang has since advanced its missile and nuclear capabilities.

KCNA also said the country’s Missile Administration conducted tests on Monday to assess the power of “a dispersal warhead of a strategic cruise missile,” following a test over the weekend of a cluster-bomb warhead, mountable on ballistic missiles and capable of striking an area of 12 to 13 hectares.

Monday’s tests confirmed the dispersal warhead tipped on the cruise missile was capable of “turning into ashes a target area of 5 to 6 hectares with its highest-density power,” the news agency said, adding the administration “perfected the capability to deliver a vertical strike against the target.”

The general director of the administration was quoted as saying that the necessity of developing a variety of weapon systems is more “urgent than ever before” to “deter all sorts of threats.”

Cluster munitions release a number of smaller submunitions over a wide area. North Korea has not acceded to the Oslo convention against cluster bombs.