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.

[mirko]

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

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...

[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...

[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.

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.