North Korea’s fingerprints are all over last year’s cyber-theft of $81m from Bangladeshi central bank accounts, according to a top US intelligence officer.

On Tuesday, National Security Agency deputy director Rick Ledgett was asked by an Aspen Institute roundtable moderator whether he believed nation states were currently in the business of robbing banks, to which Ledgett replied in the affirmative.

While Ledgett never mentioned North Korea by name, he noted that Symantec researchers had long ago suggested that the software used to pull off the 2016 theft of those Bangladeshi millions was similar to that used in the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures, which US security agencies have attributed to North Korea.

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Justice was preparing charges that would accuse North Korea of pulling off the Bangladeshi heist, allegedly with the help of Chinese middlemen. The US is involved due to the fact that the Bangladeshi accounts were held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.