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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".
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. So, really, a lack of a reliable national power grid and insufficiant will to feed the masses does not necessarily exclude the possibility that they're training script kiddies....
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Maybe they can't keep the power grid up because the CyberWarrior School uses that as a practice target.
Come and get me Script Kiddies! My IP address is 127.0.0.1
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
So what if they can't keep the power grid up now. If their government-sanctioned hax0r d00dz piss in the wrong corn flakes, they will have a lot more trouble with their power grid, communications systems, sewage systems and whatever else air strikes like to land on.
So what do you think? Can government-spondored hacking (I really hate the "cracking" euphemism, sorry) be considered an act of war?
Oh, the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea has no problem keeping the lights on at its military bases. It's the civil population that suffers. The DPRK military hoards food shipments for itself instead of distributing it to the people. But hey, the mass starvation in North Korea can hardly be laid at the feet of the ruling Communist government. Let's all repeat together - "IT'S AMERICA'S FAULT!"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So the Pentagon in spewing propaganda about South Korean propaganda about North Korea. Hmm.. Who to trust?
"Hacker" Training in Korea: how to spoof other ISPs through your country's servers.
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
I hear the parties are outrageous. And the babez? Out of control!
Best Windows Freeware
The story probably is propoganda by the South Koreans, *BUT* there is a marked difference between what the miliary gets and what civilians get. The ruling party and the military apparently get an amazingly high percentage of the resources in the country. So, while the rest of the country starves in the dark, the military eats well and probably has the lights on all the time. So, if the military wants to have a hacker school, they probably can afford to devote the resources to it. So what if a few hundred thousand peasants need to shiver in the dark!
There was a very interesting documentary special on Cinemax last month about a visit to North Korea. Sounds like quite a surreal place.
you think they are gonna do it from a government compound ? Nah I bet they go to a net cafe in Belgium or somewhere totally unrelated. The ability and knowledge is the hard part, access can be had all over the place...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I just read "The Armed Forces of North Korea" by Joseph Bermudez and some other books and reports and I don't think it'd be proper to discount the DPRK's abilities when it comes to Special Forces and Unconventional Warfare.
They've shown a high-level of professionalism when it comes in infiltrating the South and they did pull off the siezure of the USS Pueblo.
Sure the country's electrical grid is dodgy, but so was Israel and Jordan's until the late 80s. The DPRK military doesn't usually have the same electricity or food supply problems that the rest of the country has.
I'd not listen to everything the RoK says, but don't discount them as far as the Pentagon might*. The RoK is heavily infiltrated by the DPRK and I'm sure thier "cyberwar" planning would have agents in the South kick it off from that broadband rich area.
"The KPA (Korean People's Army) is still predominantly an analog and vacuum-tube force," said Alexandre Mansourov, a professor at the Pentagon's Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. "We tend to overestimate the level of information-technology expertise in the North Korean military, and South Korea is especially guilty of this."
That might be true for the majority of thier systems, but the DPRK has been buying modern SAMs ECM, Navigation and other systems from the FSR and China. Some of the more elite units in thier vast special forces have at least Gen 2-3 Night Vision and GPS recievers.
* - I've not read either link yet.
It may be just for "propaganda". Propaganda is very important to them. Blocking legitimate communications, astroturfing and sabotage are not just popular in Redmond.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
All they have to do is hack into the Lineage servers and watch as 75% of South Korean males between the ages of 15 and 40 go into the fetal position from going 'cold turkey'.
*.*
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...
Seems to me this is very similar to the nuclear situation with north korea. At the same time the pentagon is pressing for new research in nuclear weopons they're pressing Iran and North Korea to cease they efforts.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
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
This User Friendly strip :-)
The DPRK has software development expertise that is "competent, if not world class," according to Hayes.
Sure, but they probably shoot the developers in the head execution-style if they don't turn out a certain number of lines of code per hour. I'd say that's an incentive to perform. No North Korean coders wasting time on Slashdot, that's for sure.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
1) Electricity shortage
2) Little available food
Obviously, they [North Korea] is training its entire populous to live like geeks [top ramen noodle rations] and use the ultra-low power Via C3 platform. Why can't you see this, beallj? Their power grid is pressed to the limits because North Korea bounced a check to purchase a shit load of computers and is now in the process training everyone to fight the Matrix^H^H^H^H^H^H United States corporation. If they were using Athlon or Pentium4, they wouldn't have enough power! Duh!
Practicing on slower, clunkier equipment lets you concentrate on fundamentals that people with more sophosticated computers might have ignored.
The goal of such hackers isn't to create kewl programs, but to find clever tricks that waste the resources of others; so working at the fundamental machine level might give you an in. Sometimes having obstacles to overcome helps you acheive your goal. My experience is that people who learned to code on slower machines write tighter, more efficient code.
Of course, most of the security holes the hackers discover have probably been patched, but the fact that you have older equipment doesn't necessarily mean your training is worse.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The most likely foe for North Korea in any military conflict would be South Korea and its ally, the USA. Since South Korea's economy relies heavily on their IT infrastructure it is more than logical to have a credible threat at hand.
;-)
It is also far more difficult to wage war against the US, since North Korea's fleet wouldn't stand a chance against Aircraft carriers. So they would not be able to reach the American coast with enough forces to conquer the territory of the US. Considering the overwhelming force of the US military the only viable solution for the North Koreans in this asymetrical combat situation is to resort to tatics formerly only used by so called terrorists, like the Unabomber, the guy from Florida that sent the Antrax letters or the entity formerly supported by the CIA (during the 80's in Afghanistan) now known as Al Quaida, that managed a direct attack on the pentagon.
Modern civilisations have modern vurnerabilities. Our modern societies result in a lot of highly trained scientists that can research very much and very fast. Our infrasructure allows for a lot of production. This and other things allow for our overwhelming military might.
Even though it might be possible for rogue nations to infiltrate our societies with "undercover soldiers" or special forces ready to use our modern infrastructure against us in the event of war against their country I doubt if this to be possible on a large scale.
The nations that come into question here don't trust their citizen. The greatest strength modern societies have is loyalty and wealth (connected, no doubt about it). The dollar (combined with military might) proved to be the most potent weapon against resitence in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both countries the lower leaders were just bought out. The few that didn't accept the money were bombed. That showed the rest the way to go.
Anyways. Using hackers the rogue nations can attack and still control their soldiers, since they physically stay were they are. Let's wait and see what online pr0n does to them
Even the Pentagon says North Korea's hacker academy is probably just propaganda by South Korea It could also be propaganda by the pentagon in trying to portray NK as not a threat to a jumpy American populous.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Not only does North Korea have trouble keeping their power grid up, they barely even have a power grid.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I think this picture says more about North Korea than any article ever could. It's a Nasa compsite image of the Earth At Night. It shows man-made light levels. It beautifully visualizes a combination of population density and "development".
For anyone weak in geography, look at the top and all the way to the right. The bright snake shape is Japan. Go to the bottom-left of the snake and look up-left a smidgen. That bright squarish area is South Korea. It looks like South Korea is an island floating in the sea, but it isn't. North Korea is directly above South Korea. North Korea is a big black hole. If you look carefully you can see a single white dot directly above the top left corner of South Korea. That dot is the capital of North Korea.
That black hole of a country has the world's THIRD LARGEST ARMY and they want to build NUKES. They are diverting their entire economy (what little there is of it) to supporting that army and building weapons. The North Korean government is incredibly isolationist and paranoid. They claim various international organizations are "conspiring" against them. They make no secret of the fact that they want/plan to "liberate" South Korea.
North Korea is like some homeless guy who doesn't have any shoes or food because he spends all his money hoarding knives and bullets. His brother happily lives in a nice house with his wife and kids, and this guy wants to invade that house on a "liberation mission". To top it off, this guy actually has a nuclear reactor to build a nukes with.
Anyway, another facinating thing to look for on the map is the Nile River. It on the top right of Africa. It's a very thin bright line with a kink in it. Each bank of the river is densely populated and well developed, but beyond that it is pitch black and empty.
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Yet, the United States Army has plenty of money to spend on Nuclear Weapons and other kinds of weapons of mass destructions. Plus, the US is the only country that regularly uses these kind of weapons against defenseless countries.
Huh? Perhaps I'm compleatly off base here, but when has the US used Nuclear weapons against defensless countries on a regular basis? We've used them twice, against a country we were at war with, over 50 years ago. I would hardly consider that 'regular' useage, and I would hardly consider WWII era Japan 'defenceless'.
And I'd be curious to know when we've used other weapons of mass distruction. Nerve agents in vietnam? I suppose you could argue that that exercise 30 years ago a deployment of WOMD... but it'd be a stretch. Regular? Hardly.
. . . the US is the only country . . . against defenseless countries.
So when all those third world nations used (and continue to use) WOMD against other nations and their own people, they somehow don't count?
Their president is an idiot and a warmonger.
Oh. Now I understand. Because you don't like the president, it's ok to make up things about America. Makes perfect sense.
There are lots of good, sound reasons to criticise Bush and America's forigen policy. Telling bold face lies is not one of them.
The Internet is generally stupid
Why would this matter, to you or to anyone else?
Because GWB and his hawks claimed that they knew Iraq had WMD, and led their nation to war on that ground. It seems clear that was a lie.
This wasn't any little white lie either, tens of thousands of people were killed as a result of it.
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
I have to agree. I learned on DOS on a 286(I'm 15) and I'm a hell of a lot more dangerous than my friends who had the latest Intel chip(a 486 with win3.1) at the time.
The 486 was only the latest intel chip for 3 years: 1991-1993. If you are 15 now in 2003, this means you were 3 to 5 years old at the time.
There is a difference between learning how to USE a computer and learning how to "hack".
From the article:
:-)
:-)
"The following year, Pentagon adviser and Rand consultant John Arquilla concocted a fictional scenario, published in Wired magazine, of a global cyberwar engineered by -- whom else -- the North Koreans."
Later in the article:
"Arquilla said highly automated U.S. military processes, such as the "air tasking order" of an air campaign, or time-phased deployment of troops and equipment, could be disrupted by a North Korean cyberattack."
"In such cases, the disruption of American combat operations and logistics could make a very substantial difference in the overall military campaign," said Arquilla.
So I can infere from what mr. Arquilla said that the US armed forces coordinate their logistics and operations using the open structure from the Internet and it's usual tools...
I almost can see general Schwarzkopf using ICQ group messages to coordinate an attack... the friendly fire? someone looking at some p0rn webcam get so excited and fires a full blast
geez... how I would like to be a consultant... talking bullshit like this and getting attention... and if I really wanted to get media attention I would mention blinding comms sattelites and using EMP weapons in the war field... they would think "geez... this guy is Grand Moff Tarkin incarnated"
I know this will be modded down, but I feel I must comment on this being a bad thing, as they will only use it to write more cheats and wall hacks for counter-strike, and ruin the game play for the rest of us. Down with those communists!
SuPz.orG
North Korea also has plenty of IP connectivity. If you look back through the news you'll discover their government did a hosting deal with a large internet casino where the casino did all the work and the government got some of the bandwidth.
In 1996, North Korea sent well-trained and well-armed infiltration agents into South Korea on an information-gathering mission and if it hadn't been for one sharp-eyed cabdriver, we might never have known that it had even happened.
With leadership resembling a Stalinist 'cult of personality' possessing total information control at its disposal, the North Korean government can create and has created effective personel resources in areas pertaining to espionage and infiltration. This well-documented fact makes the idea of North Korea's running a military 'cyberacademy' a lot more credible than the Iraq-obsessed U.S. Government which has a stake in playing down a North Korean threat would have you believe.
Two incidents show go far to prove this:
The first is the aforementioned infiltration of Nouth Korean reconnaisance troops by submarine.
After the infiltrator's accidental discovery, they were hunted down by south Korean Military and police units. After a series of bloody firefights, rather than face capture some of the infiltrators and submarine crew were shot to death by their own officers.
Here is a link to the story. http://www.koreascope.org/english/sub/2/nk10_7.ht
The second is the discovery after thirty years, that North Korea sent agents into Japan to kidnap individuals to serve as tutors in masquerading as Japanese nationals for the North Korean intelligence services. These people, among others, were flown to Japan for a brief reunion after decades of captivity during which their families had long since given them up for dead.
North Korea may have a very low GNP by western standards, but it is an industrialized nation and the ability of its government to divert resources from one segment of society to another certainly lends strong credence to the threat described in the article.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
LOL. If you want to ridicule a post by echoing it and "reversing" who it talks about, you have to make sure the reversal maintains atleast a smidgin of truth. Otherwise you just make yourself look like an idiot.
That black hole of a country
On that map North Korea is in fact a "black hole". It looks like ocean. The United states is by far the brightest region, with "the whole of euorpe" coming in a close second.
the world's LARGEST ARMY and LARGEST NUMBER OF NUKES.
You are demonstrating pure ignorance. China has the worlds larget army, 2.9 million servicemen, more than double the US's 1.4 million. Russia has the most nukes, well over twice as many as the US.
They are diverting their entire economy (what little there is of it) to supporting that army and building weapons.
North Korea spends somewhere between 20% and 30% of its GDP on its military while approximately 10% of its population has starved to death in recent years. The US spends somewhere between 4.3% and 5.7% on its military, and the US spends a higher percentage of its miliary spending on RESEARCH, compared to all western nations. The US provides food (food stamps) to anyone who needs them.
The North American government is incredibly isolationist
LMAO! Isolationist?? The usual complaint is the exact the opposite.
and paranoid.
The US thinks that there are terrorists trying to blow up Americans and American buildings. Americans and American builings are in fact blowing up.
In this document North Korea accuses the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency of conspiring to harm North Korea. Part of the "proof" of this supposed conspiracy is the fact that North Korea is reffered to as "North Korea" rather than as "DPRK". They take a "serious view" of this "insult to their soverignty". This document is fairly typical of North Korean perception on international relations. Not to mention their constant fear that at any moment the 38,000 US personel and South Korea's half million servicemen are going to charge head-long into what is undoubtedly the most heavily forified border in the world, against the third largest army in the world.
As for Liberation, Iraqis were in fact dancing in the streets and toppling Saddam statues. Somehow I don't think you are going to find many South Koreans welcoming North Korean forces.
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