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S. Korea Claims N. Korea Has Trained 600 Crackers
maggeth writes "The Financial Times is reporting that North Korea's military and intel services have trained as many as 600 computer hackers specifically for attacks against South Korea, Japan, and the US. South Korea claims that the north has a five-year university program for hacker training and cites recent attacks on government computer systems. The South Korean defense ministry claimed in the report that 'North Korea's intelligence warfare capability is estimated to have reached the level of advanced countries,' and that the caliber of the North's hackers is high. So far it appears that these specific attacks are based in China, although it is not clear if North Korea is using Chinese networks or if China is involved."
They followed the proper nomenclature (a pleasant surprise to me) and called malicious hackers "crackers".
See http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/cracker.html
and then this:
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
I myself am personally offended when people think that hackers are malicious.
toresbe
Bomb the fuck out of the North Korean military and invade.
The problem, of course, isn't one of a vietnam-style conflict, it's one of the North leveling Seoul to the ground via conventional arms. In every single conventional-arms scenario, Seoul is lost before the war is won.
Just a couple of days ago I received a few phishing e-mails disguised to look like CitiBank e-mails that pointed to servers based in China. The e-mails originated from China as well. I even did some of the work for the FBI and sent full registration info for those IP addresses.
I was quite disappointed when I tried to report it to the FBI and I got what was clearly and automated response that said, "This is not an automated response."
Also recently I was privy to a situtation where a computer in a school system was acting VERY strange and typing text in Word on its own that seemed half gibberish and half not but with text that could almost be confused for terrorist communications. The school system called the FBI and gave them the IP of the machine. The FBI said they were monitoring it to try to determine the cause. The only problem? It was a private IP address and impossible to monitor remotely.
I understand that the FBI probably guessed (quite correctly IMO) that the computer was infected with one of the new worms that uses the dictation engine, but they told the school they were monitoring which was a lie. Additionally, they sent me an e-mail that said it wasn't automated when it so clearly was. No wonder we had intelligence failures leading up to 9/11.