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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
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!
"Hacker" Training in Korea: how to spoof other ISPs through your country's servers.
I hear the parties are outrageous. And the babez? Out of control!
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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.
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.
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
No they didn't; they admitted to having *a nuclear weapons programme*.
They're trying to make nuclear weapons, and they have the resources necessary to do so, but they haven't yet demonstrated any success.
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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.
When do we start?
Sudan - watch out! Burundi - take that! Zimbabwe - you're next!
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
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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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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