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."

Comments

If true, the stakes are now higher.

[mind21_98]

I seem to think N. Korea's using this as a tool to gain leverage in talks. Then again, if they do have six hundred trained people ready to conduct cyberwarfare and have no qualms doing it, we could very well be screwed. In any case, it's probably not in their best interest to go through with it.

Re:If true, the stakes are now higher.

[Anonymous Coward]

North korea may have 600 highly trained crackers, but we have slashdot, and the power of FIFTY THOUSAND CLICKS per link. If that can't bring an entire country down within a few days, nothing will.

Re:If true, the stakes are now higher.

[killapenguin]

Why wouldn't they go through with an attack? A cyber-attack has the benefits of causing no bloodshed but could potentially cause anything from a minor headache to millions (if not billions) of dollars in damages if launched properly.

Also, it's pretty interesting that the attacks on S. Korean computer systems seemed to be based in China. If this were indeed true (doubtful), this would cast doubt on dubbya's assertion in the debate that bilateral talks with N. Korea will alienate China, which is supposedly imposing some kind of leverage on N. Korea.

Re:If true, the stakes are now higher.

[jginspace]

In any case, it's probably not in their best interest to go through with it.

Yes. I'm in Vietnam and the quality of their comrades here is nothing to be frightened of.

Key word is "trained". Trained by whom? You're not going to learn much when you don't have the equipment, you're hungry, and you have to spend six hours a day in political indoctrination classes.

Anyone with talent *and* internet access will be busy looking over their shoulders because they'll naturally be on the "highly susupicious" list at the Ministry of Culture. And they'll want to devote at least of few hours' worth of that talent to making some extra cash to make sure their families can put an extra cabbage in the pot.

Then remember it'll be easy to know which direction to look for these hackers. The only place a North Korean hacker is not going to stick out, or the only place he can afford to live, is China.

This article is just trying to scare us. They had nothing better to write about. Nothing to worry about; nothing to see here.

Re:If true, the stakes are now higher.

[Riktov]

Anyone with talent *and* internet access will be busy looking over their shoulders because they'll naturally be on the "highly susupicious" list at the Ministry of Culture

In the DRPK annyone with internet access at all is already part of the state's techno elite and de facto an agent.

The only place a North Korean hacker is not going to stick out, or the only place he can afford to live, is China.

Why not South Korea or Japan? And goverment agents can probably afford to live anywhere.

Re:If true, the stakes are now higher.

[mirko]

600 crackers for almost 23 million persons ?
I understand why they say they are starving !

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

South Korea has started training cookies to counter the NK threat.

Re:In other news...

[Echnin]

I think the US would not succeed in a land war in North Korea. A major reason they have so many poor is that military spending is so high; 33.9% of GDP. This is over 10 times as much as the US. Of course, considering their GDP is about 1000th of what the US GDP, this may not seem like a huge amount. But it still remains a fact that North Korea has the fourth largest army in the world, with 1.2 million men. The US has 1.4 million. They have a bit of outdated equipment, but they have plenty of fully-working tanks, artillery and APCs. You think the US stands a chance in a land war? You already lost to them once.

But the real question is, why would the US want to invade North Korea? They are showing signs of accepting a free market economy -- some areas have been designated as special free market zones, and this may spread throughout the rest of the country. Sure, they're far behind, but they can drag themselves out of this mess.

Re:In other news...

[Dusabre]

33% of shit still means shit. An Aegis costs as much as North Korea's military budget. 70's artillery, infantry and fighting vehicles are worthless against the US military machine which is built around smashing artillery, infantry and fighting vehicles. Saddam had better equipment in '91 and '03 than North Korea has in '04. He also had the 3rd/4th largest army in '91. He got creamed.

Problem with the US army is that it can't fight insurgents and doesn't want to learn how. As an aside, the moment that the military started boasting about bodycounts, I knew the insurgency was winning. The military should be boasting about how many guerillas didn't appear and weren't killed, rather than how many grabbed guns with glee and got bombed (along with civilians), dying in glee (going to heaven...).

The US (as part of the UN) fought China and North Korea to a standstill. Only Chinese intervention saved North Korea - at the point a million Chinese 'volunteers' intervened, more than 90% of North Korea was occupied by US/UN troops.

North Korea is accepting a market economy to the same degree that Castro is a nice guy whose only vice is smoking cigars. Believe it and you're believing the complex lies of a regime who only excels in lies.

Interesting...

[ncaraballo]

Interesting since they seem to lack alot of technology up there. Have you seen satellite pictures? Seoul looks like L.A. while North Korea is pitch black. A very poor and low tech country last I heard.

Re:Interesting...

[ArcticCelt]

"The normal people are so food-deprived, there are claims of cannibalism in the North."

If I was called a "cracker" I would be kind of worried about what you just said!

Re:Interesting...

[bersl2]

Anyway, this isn't anti-US, I just hope that the near future of people who are hungry contains food, not bombs.

This is where the problem lies. We are giving them food. However, the North Korean government is re-appropriating this food for its own purposes. Besides that, the only reason they can't grow all the food they need is because the best farming land is reserved for opium, by mandate of the North Korean government. (The War on Terror intersects the War on Drugs. And there was much rejoicing.)

So let's see what options exist:
1) Bomb the fuck out of the North Korean military and invade. Problem: a modern government/military is comprised of "the people." Maybe an invasion would turn out like a bloodier Iraq on the front end, but it would surely be more worthy an action.
2) Disable the WMDs covertly, then negotiate now that they have no leverage. This is very risky and not likely to work.
3) Continue the economic sanctions on North Korea, but continue to give humanitarian aid. Same as usual, with no progress.
4) Completely cut off North Korea from the rest of the world, except China (probably). Does no good.

Kim Jhong-Il (sp) is entirely different from Saddam. Kim is a rising star as far as dictators are concerned, and Saddam was old and busted. Besides, North Korea has the WMDs.

In short: Yeah, I'd rather not see bombs. But the food is never going to get into the hands of the North Korean people as long as Dr. Evil over there is still in charge.

Re:Interesting...

[jedrek]

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.

Re:Interesting...

[HeghmoH]

Actually, joking aside, the US is more interested in bombing the shit out of North Korea than making any gestures of help for these people.

Do you have any suggestions? The international community would be very happy to hear it if you actually came up with something workable.

The problem is that North Korea is both dangerous and oppressive on a scale that makes Iraq look like Luxembourg by comparison. While Iraq's people were somewhat poor and rather oppressed, North Korea is systematically crushing, murdering, and starving its people. It is more or less the crushing poverty and famine you would think typical of Ethopia with a government so tyrannical and powerful that it would make Stalin proud. The whole thing is run by nutjobs who are so into the cult of personality that the current President has been dead for over ten years and they still can't stand to remove him from the office.

Despite having an economy that is smaller than a medium-sized American city, and being full of starving people, this country has one of the largest and most powerful armies in the world. This is accomplished by spending almost one quarter of their entire GDP (note: not budget, but GDP) on the military. By contrast, the US spends about 3.3% of its GDP on its military.

North Korea is many things Iraq was not. It is genuinely, horribly oppressive. (Iraq's regime was evil, but not any more evil than dozens of other countries.) It has an actual, credible military threat to our allies in the region. (Seoul would be more or less flat within hours of the beginning of a war.) It has a great possibility of making life very difficult for any invaders, because of its gigantic army, the fact that the terrain is incredibly mountainous, and its people have been trained from birth to believe that their government is all that stands between them and a world bent on turning them into slaves. North Korea is also a pariah in the international community in a way that Iraq never was. The only country that even pretends to be friendly with them is China, and they only do it because it's a bad idea to piss off an army of a million fanatics sitting on your doorstep.

Oh, did I mention that this delightful place either has nuclear weapons or could produce them within a year if they so chose? Did I also mention that they have ballistic missiles with enough range to hit some targets on the west coast of the US? Another thing that's different from Iraq; they actually have WMD, and their leader is probably crazy enough to consider using them even if it meant the certain death of himself and 99% of his people.

Sending food, money, or anything else will not help these people. The North Koreans are suffering not because of abject poverty or famine, but because their government is totally insane. The poverty and famine is just a side effect.

The current plan seems to boil down to saying "nice doggy" and hoping that something changes. Leaving things as they are is not really acceptable, given that they will only increase their capacity to do murder and mayhem in the world at large. Invasion is pretty much out of the question, given the difficulty of protecting our allies in the region and the difficulty of actually winning. Engineering a collapse is out of the question for similar reasons; the only thing worse than having a million-man army lead by total wackos on your doorstep is having a the remnants of a million-man fanatical army suddenly stripped of its leadership and left to fend for itself, not to mention the nuclear weapons factor.

If you can come up with some kind of plan to help out, that would be great. The current worldwide consensus seems to be "pretend that there really isn't a problem, and hope that I'm out of office by the time it reaches the crisis point."

Re:Interesting...

[G-funk]

The current worldwide consensus seems to be "pretend that there really isn't a problem, and hope that I'm out of office by the time it reaches the crisis point."

That's pretty much the most insightful thing I've read here in a long time, and pretty much sums up what's wrong with democratic capitalism as we have it at the moment.

Re:Interesting...

[HeghmoH]

That's entirely legitimate. Motive, means, and opportunity.

Means I already discussed.

Opportunity is there every day. It's just one order to send their army rushing across the DMZ into South Korea, start producing nukes, or launch those nukes at the US.

That brings us to motive. As you recognize, that's the most complicated piece of the whole thing. I don't entirely understand this part, but I'll do my best.

Korea's history in the 20th century isn't very happy. It spent most of the first half of the century under Japanese occupation. The Japanese were not known as particularly friendly occupiers (this is putting it much nicer than it should be). As the Second World War came to a close, Korea got liberated from two directions at once, with the US coming in from the south, and the USSR coming in from the north. Just as in Germany, the two sides immediately set up governments that were loyal to them. Of course, the US claimed that South Korea was an independent ally, and North Korea was a puppet to the Russians. The USSR claimed the opposite. Presumably the truth was in between.

Anyway, to cut the story short, war happened, with each side getting lots of assistance (and presumably more than a few orders) from their superpower allies. Each side saw the other side's system as fundamentally evil, and something that had to be stopped, but pragmatically there was nothing more to do. Like in Germany, the two sides were forced to deal with each other. Unlike Germany, the two sides had spent years fighting each other in war, and relations were much colder. The two Germanies kept reasonably close all through the Cold War, but the two Koreas were (and still are) separated by the most heavily fortified border on the planet, just waiting for somebody to twitch and start another war.

Fast forward a few decades, to the 90s. Communism collapses or transforms worldwide. By 1992, the remaining countries that are still actually Communist (and not just calling themselves that) have dwindled to, basically, Cuba and North Korea. North Korea's two big traditional allies, Russia and China, have basically converted to the other side and are busily making friends with the West. China is still Communist in name, and still making friendly gestures to North Korea, but nothing significant.

Motive for the leaders depends on whether you think they are idealistic or pragmatic. If they're idealistic, then North Korea is pretty much the last bastion in the world for Communism. The Imperialist Capitalists have conquered pretty much the rest of the planet. If they're pragmatic, it's almost the same, just with a cynical touch; the entire power structure depends on the rigid Communist system. They fear, rightly or not, that reforms will destroy their government.

Motive for the people is simpler, since they hear what their government wants them to hear. The fact that the US has had troops in South Korea for over fifty years doesn't help. Never mind that it's not an occupying force; government propaganda excels at twisting the truth in subtle ways.

The three disaster scenarios are collapse, conventional attack, and nuclear attack. Collapse doesn't need a motive, of course, since it wouldn't be intentional. Both attack scenarios share a motive; they provide hostages to secure the country's safety (the inhabitants of Seoul for the conventional attack, the inhabitants of Seattle or San Francisco for the nuclear option). Conventional attack has another potential motive, which is conquering/liberating the South. Take the fact that diplomatic communications with North Korea are almost nil, combine it with the fact that the North's leaders are incredibly paranoid, and you have a situation which is ripe for misunderstandings. MAD only works well when both sides are rational and communicating with each other. It is entirely conceivable that a move which we think is non-threatening could be interpreted as something which needs a response.

Huh?

[shutdown -p now]

Crackers? You mean, the guys sit there and undermine US economy by cracking and distributing warez?

which is better

[rock_climbing_guy]

Which is better:

A: to be able to have a hundred or so crackers attack a web site at your demand or

B: to be able to publish an article linking to them and therefore slashdot their communications into oblivion?

Hacked by Koreans

[CdBee]

This may be purely coincidental, but some months ago a friend pointed me toward the official website of North Korea out of amusement (its very much a dictatorial-regime website)

Seconds he and I both received warnings from our firewalls that we were under attack by a variety of means. The originating IP addresses were in Seoul.

Based on that, I wonder if the South Koreans have/had compromised a North Korean web-server.

Poor guys

[mkro]

They will be SO dissapointed when they discover that the rest of the world has upgraded from Win95, and winnuke.exe does not work anymore.

Yawn.

[salvorHardin]

Reminds me of a similar thing in NTK a while back.

> DISABLE ECONOMY
> You cannot do that here.
> EXAMINE CYBER INFRASTRUCTURE
> Access Denied.
> HIT ECONOMY WITH STICK

and then it happens

[Konster]

If they start hacking us, we will cut their phone line, this rendering their sole 300-baud modem useless.

ironically, more truth than sarcasm

[lingqi]

As flamebait and as troll the parent is, considering that this is the N.Korean OFFICAL page and their central news agency is hosted in japan... I really do wonder about the amount of computers in the country.

you have to realize that most companies are forbidden to export anything to N.K. And to think the latency of the last explosion getting out - it's no wonder as there are 1.1million phone lines in a country of 22.7m people. cellular phone availability data is nonexistant, and all the phone are routed through beijing and russia.

sort of to answer the origial story, though - N.K. probably is using china's networks to get online not necessarily because china have anything to do it other than just selling them bandwidth (just like MCI could be selling bandwidth to western malicious internet personalities without knowledge). I do wonder if the said hackers have to contend with the firewall of china, though...

Re:ironically, more truth than sarcasm

[Netsnipe]

Well either the North Koreans aren't the ones designing their own homepage, or they can't even set the timezone right on their own computers:

<!-- Fireworks 3.0 Dreamweaver 3.0 target. Created Tue Jul 02 19:38:55 GMT+0200 (Romance Daylight Time) 2002 -->

compare Korea with Iran

[Jacek Poplawski]

Someone asked here "is there North Korea Linux Group". This is interesting question. I am active member of ORKUT. I was really suprised when someone from Iran added me as friend. I was even more suprised when I realized how many people from Iran are in Orkut. Country which is called "part of Axis of Evil" has Free Internet Access - greatest invention ever. What about North Korea? Nothing. There are no people from N.Korea in Internet. You can find official websites or information about N.Korea, but you can't concact with anyone. You can't talk with people from N.Korea. It is one big prison. Even Iran is heaven in compare to N.Korea.

Re:compare Korea with Iran

[KjetilK]

Well, yes, Iran has probably among the more vibrant blogging communities in the world. I follow a few Iranian blogs regularily. Hoder is a good starting point. And authorities are cracking down on it, pissing all the kids off. Iran is strange, on one hand, the majority of the people are highly educated, they understand democracy, and there are lots of good people in higher positions, in universities, for example. So, if one were to start a democratic revolution in the Middle East, what one should do is start cooperation with the progressive forces in Iran. Contrary to Iraq, you could actually come with a lot of support to people without aiding the mullahs. A good example of this is the CERN /Iran collaboration. With these forces gaining status and strength in society, a peaceful transition to democracy would be imminent. Many of these leading figures is of the clear opinion that current US policy has been a severe setback.

NK is not a state...

[killbill!]

It is a criminal organization that happens to control a territory and exploit starving slaves.

It routinely abducts Japanese and South Korean citizens just to keep NK spies trained (Kim, a movie buff, also had a director kidnapped so he could direct movies for his own enjoyment!).
Moreover, NK is the world's largest counterfeit money manufacturer and a major drug manufacturer. Oh, and it's into exporting weapons and missiles, too.

It is not only into illegal exports. It's also into massive-scale blackmail. It's been into nuclear blackmail for quite some time. Turning to cyber-blackmail was only a logical step.
When one is desperate for money, any buzzword-compliant threat will do.

This is not a country. This is SPECTRE.
Maybe the CIA should start training killer angora cats ;p

if only it were so simple

[feepcreature]

There seems to be a lot of staggering naivity about the capabilities of nations poorer than the USA.

Sanctions may make it harder for the man in the street to buy computing equipment, but they cannot stop a determined state form getting what is so widely available in the rest of the world. So if North Korea wants hacking hardware, they can get it.

It doesn't really matter how poor the average person is, or how little food or power or money most groups have - if something is important to a dictatorship (like their own personal comfort, or security) it can be generously resourced. Think Saddam's palaces. So they can afford to train to hack.

Don't underestimate educational possibilities. Quality of education has very little to do with GNP - look at the dire state of public schools in the US. Training of the elite can be very effective in less rich countries - the most important thing is usually motivation. Actually, the US system also shows that resources CAN be concentrated to produce pockets of excellence! So if NK wants effective training, it's hardly impossible.

So they could train and resoure a significant number of hackers, if they wanted. The casual complacency of some here reminds me of the attitude of the WWII British in Singapore - just before the Japanese Army cycled round the back of the fortifications and invaded.

On the other hand, North Korea may not have done any of that. Or they may have tried, and been ineffective (though you don't have to be THAT good, to crack lots of systems). It's prudent to take precautions, but daft to panic.

As with any security question, consider what is the problem, whether the solution fixes it, what are the disadvantages of the solution, and whether the tradeoff is worth it. Most sensible precautions are already known - to sensible users and not a few slashdotters ;-)

And it's also worth looking at where the story came from, and when. Just because it's a South Korean defence agency doesn't make it untrue (they are in a better position to understand local threats than many outsiders). And the North is ratcheting up tension, by refusing talks. But beware of spin - both from those releasing the stoy, and those who want a pretext for new "security" measures...

In A.D. 2004 War was beginning

[Jakhel]

UN: What happen ?
South Korea: Somebody set up us the bomb.
South Korea: We get signal.
South Korea: What !
UN: Main screen turn on.
South Korea: It's You !!
North Korea: How are you gentlemen !!
North Korea: All your base are belong to us.
North Korea: You are on the way to destruction.
South Korea: What you say !!
North Korea: You have no chance to survive make your time.
North Korea: HA HA HA HA ....