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Australia Vulnerable to Korean Hacking Army
Nan writes "An army of more than 500 hackers hired by the North Korean military could find Australian businesses a "softer target" than their U.S. or European-based counterparts, according to security experts. The hacking army's mission is to break into South Korean, Japanese and American corporate networks to gather intelligence and steal trade secrets, according to reports."
From the article -
"This is probably more boasting than a real threat. In the past we have seen similar claims from the Taiwanese and the East Timorese," said Hyppönen.
Heh. Probably yet another of those notice us! notice us! type publicity stunt by N Korea.
And even if they do hack into an odd website or two, people will start to take notice and will act on it. It's far easier to secure your networks than launch an offensive on N Korea.
These guys just need to be ignored while they jump around their cages trying to garner attention.
Echelon is a perfectly known and adkowledged spy network. It surely is not in the conspiracy theory domain anymore. And a report from the European Commission proves the stealing of European Companies trade secrets and subsequent use of said trade secret by US companies (Boeing being the most well-known exemple).
Welcome in the new world!
Well, this is surely no conspiracy theory. There are a number of examples that proove that Echelon is used for spying trade secrets.
Germany even sponsors projects like "GnuPG" and similar to protect EU companies from thefts.
There is nothing the EU can do against Echelon, I have no clue why - but they have probably political reasons.
Many people like to think that australia and new zealand are backwards counties down in the middloe of nowhere. In reality many of Australian businesses adopt technology and security standards much faster than thier US counterparts.
Its funny that many of the best security professionals throughout the 80s where based from Australia. This trend has continued and Australian businesses are often well prepared and secured. This is obviously a fairly big generalisation with companies like Optus having major breakings etc most of the major corporates in australia have a very good security history.
"The hacking army's mission is to break into South Korean, Japanese and American corporate networks to gather intelligence and steal trade secrets, according to reports."
So, if I understand correctly, Aussie businesses may be a softer target, but they aren't targeted.
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I learned this a couple days ago. The "First World" is made of Capitalist/Western countries, the "Second World" is made of Communist/Eastern countries, and "Third World" countries are those that don't fit into either catagory. So North Korea is really a Second World country, not 4th.
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the only solution is diplomacy. these people clearly think that their position is the right one; well, why is that? learn the answer to that question, and use diplomacy ...
I think it is a bit more difficult than that. North Korea recently threatened to turn Japan into a "nuclear sea of fire" should the US attack NK with nukes.
Rhetoric like that shows just how insane this regime is, and how difficult diplomacy will be. If the DPRK ("Democratic Peoples" Republic of North Korea) had their way, they would be blackmailing their way to wealth using what nuclear power they can ammass. So good luck with diplomacy. And we should probably start our diplomacy by addressing the nuclear issue. Somehow I think that the issue of hacking is pretty low on the State Department's to-do list.
As a security professional in Australia, we're not behind at all. We patch our web servers, mail servers and use modern firewall appliances.
From the 80s we've been teaching the rest of the world how to hack. For a history lesson check Suelette Dreyfus's book Underground.
Australia invented the fax machine, fibre optic cabling and the black box flight recorder!