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North Korea's School For Hackers?
Makoto writes "How do you launch a cyber-war with no IP infrastructure? South Korea claims that North Korea is training about 100 "cybersoldiers" per year in electronic warfighting tools and techniques, including writing viruses and hacking. But according to a story at Wired News, North Korea can barely keep its electrical grid up - not to mention feed its people. Even the Pentagon says North Korea's hacker academy is probably just propaganda by South Korea."
Just because they don't have a general electrical grid doesn't mean that they can't keep electricity going to their "hacker compound".
In other news... we still have not found any weapons of mass destruction In Iraq despite our government telling us that they there.
Even if they do have a hacker school, so what? Like we here in the states do not teach a subset of our military these skills. Hacking is cheap and easy way of causing a lot of damage. It's a smart thing for them to try.
Davak
So you're saying it's tougher to be a script kiddie than it is to, say, fly a commercial airliner?
You can teach anybody just about anything, and given a large enough population of people you can even find those who are naturally good at certain things to begin with. Or maybe you don't think that smart people would ever be opposed to America and its allies?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I don't think any other problems North Korea may have has any bearing on whether or not they have high-tech hacking schools. I work for a large multinational and am repsonsible for IT in all areas outside US and Europe and the bushmen with bamboo computers and blow-guns myth is precisely that. Goddam Nigeria buys Pentium 4's, you think North Korea still uses vacuum tubes as the article laughingly asserts? Hell, India is considered one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, have nuclear weapons and a space programme, but have barely 50% literacy. North Korea builds 8-lane highways that go virtually unused for future growth, don't think they don't have the resources and bright minds to throw at a military problem they think is pressing. I'm not saying the school is real, I really wouldn't know, but don't subscribe to the myth that everyone else in the world is using Lite-Brite instead of notebooks...
The true purpose of such a North Korea group might actually be to train their gurus with the latest and greatest information... ...to keep tabs on their own people!
While it may be difficult to get into large systems here in the United States and do a lot of damage, it it much easier to install backdoors and logging programs.
One large threat to the North Korean government is its own people. Knowing what these people are reading and saying online is a great step in repressing rebellion.
Davak
It is axiomatic in the security biz that everyone is undersecured. But consider the huge number of attacks we get every day. There are plenty of free-range viruses. There are lots and lots and lots of exploits and attacks. Some of the people creating them are damned bright and very well trained.
And that's just the hobbyists. We aren't even addressing the ones who do it for money.
So why hasn't computing crashed and burned forever under the weight of all of these? It's because, in our sloppy suboptimal way, we have learned to respond. The procedures for identifying a new attack or vulnerability aren't great. But they are good enough. Our collective immune system responds.
If North Korea is training 100 l33t hax0rs a year it's a drop in the slop bucket of pros and amateurs already out there doing harm.
If the numbers aren't that impressive, then how about the kinds of attacks they can do? My suspicion is that it isn't nearly as bad as it seems at first glance. This is North Korea we are talking about. There aren't that many people who have grown up living and breathing OS source code. Of the few really skilled people they have many (most? all?) are probably needed in other capacities making them unavailable to write the next Big Worm.
And how good will they be? Creativity, the free play of ideas, and the ability to see things from a different perspective - all of which are important to being a really good code monkey let alone a world class security breaker - are capital crimes in North Korea. Praising the Great Leader and lock-step conformity don't cut it when you are trying to come up with the unexpected and the truly creative.
So even if it's not pure propaganda from Seoul I'm not all that worried.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
yes, because South Koreans are the first and best impartial group to ask when you want to know whether North Korea is being good and evil.
Why that would be like asking the United States if there were WMD in Iraq.
Do you think Eritrea and Ethiopia joined the "coaltion of the willing" because they believed the US and felt a moral obligation to stop Saddam, or do you think maybe they just both wanted the US on their side in a border dispute, and couldn't give a shit whether the US was telling the truth about Iraq.
The point of all of this is when there is a dispute, its best to hear the account of imparital bystander than that of the people involved in the dispute.
While that's true, they've also managed to turn out atomic weapons, which is quite a bit more complicated than training someone to use nmap.
/.'ers who are still that naive. We've got to put them in a jar and keep them in a museum for future generations to look at - it would be a shame if we loose you guys for good...
You've gotta love our fellow
No, I didn't mean to insult you, skyshadow (sorry if I did), but seriously, when was the last time we could trust what we hear from the media in general or the whitehouse in particular? Even South Korea now says that most likely the Noth is bluffing, and there is precisely zero conclusive intelligence results to substantiate the claim that they have any nukes. They are bluffing and trying to blackmail US and others into giving them energy (they really don't have much of a choice, BTW). It's that simple.
Also consider that according to intelligence, N Korea possibly has enough radioactive material for a bomb. No proof of the existence of the bomb itself though. No word of whether they have sufficient expertise to build one. If you consider that we have an 'undeniable' proof that Iraq has chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons, and we haven't found squat there yet, I wouldn't be very convinced that allegations about Korea are anywhere close to truth at all. After all, if we can't find evidence to back up the 'undeniable proof', what are the chances of finding evidence to support the 'possibility'?
And claiming that they were preparing hackers for 20 years... Give me a break! If 20 years ago we knew what computers would become now, chances are everyone would've given much thought to such things as security, Y2K problems, etc, and we wouldn't be seeing a few dozen new M$ holes a week. I doubt any country, including (and especially) N.Korea could've had that much foresight. US didn't see that; Europe didn't; N.Korea did. They must have a really good magic 8-ball or something!
It's very easy to declare someone you don't like a terrorist, an axis of evil, and blame them for all possible sins while attaching every negative label available. Especially when no proof of such allegations is necessary, or even expected. While I don't know much about N.Korea in particular (besides that they aren't the nicest guys on the block), I am very sceptical that any of the allegations made can stick to them. The only reason why these allegations aren't seen as totally bogus is that it's not in their best interests to refute them. They want to look scarier than they really are so they can blackmail others into giving them what they need (in this case energy, whether in petroleum from US or otherwise). And all that cyber-terrorism crap is nothing more than a FUD that is a result of someone's sick imagination.
Jobs? Which jobs?