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."

Comments

Or maybe it's true

[beallj]

Just because they don't have a general electrical grid doesn't mean that they can't keep electricity going to their "hacker compound".

Even if it's true, how important is it?

[Walter Wart]

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.