North Korean Hackers Rival CIA?

Bitchslap_69 writes "According to a report in the South Korean paper Cho Sun Ilbo, North Korea 'employs 500-600 hackers who are tasked with hacking into computer networks and disabling enemy command and communication systems.' The person making this claim is Dr. Byeon Jae-jeong of the South Korean Defense Ministry's Agency for Defense Development (ADD). He claims the DPRK hackers to be 'equal to that of the CIA,' whatever that might mean."

Comments

Re:War in Iraq

[dancingmad]

North Korea is not in southeast Asia. Northeast Asia is comprised of China, Japan, and the Koreas (plus places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Okinawa). I'm very much aware that north is a relative term, but my point was that Korea is still Northeast Asia.

Re:a few questions

[damsa]

North Koreans go abroad to study. Japan is especially popular. I've heard of North Koreans in US schools. But not sure if it is just a rumor.

How can Kim Jong Il be the only one with internet in North Korea, what about the sysadmin. Or what about the nerdy North Korean teenager that comes in and cleans out his spyware. Or how can he Pwn in Star Craft without internet. I guess he can go to Lan Parties, but that gets old, especially when your Monitor is like 1000 pounds.

How do they get trained hackers?

[gojomo]

Maybe they kidnap them from Japan.

See for example their history of doing the same to acquire knowledge about the outside world:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2087627/

The Korea Times

[TheLearnerX]

The Korea Times has a more informative version of this article.

Ever heard about the term botnet ?

[Gopal.V]

> The average cable modem user in America has more bandwidth than their entire country.

The country itself need not have enough bandwidth. Distributed DoS could take down a box using american zombie PCs. And let me tell you, there is no dearth of those. An attack from the inside of the network is perfectly possible - ever read Andromeda Strain ?. A compromised machine inside your network would need you to have a LOT of scissors :)

> It's hard to afford computers and network access when 99.9% of your GDP goes to support your military and feed your people.

Cyber warfare is military funded ... It is military without all the blood and guts routine - with all the Art of War fire tactics.

Hackers? Not the CIA but US STRATCOM (DoD)

[EQ]

The CIA? That blows any sort of credibility in the report. The CIA doesnt run "hakcers", the Department of Defense does, HQ'd on an Airforce base. It was publicised back in April in this article on Wired.com Yes there is a trehat to the free world's information infrastructure. And it is a danger. But the main article far overstates it. The referenced original article is propaganda, pure and simple. Someone must want some budget money, so they scare up a foe to be bigger than it is.

Re:War in Iraq

[pingveno]

Saddam hadn't exactly been making a lot of progress on the nukes. All of the evidence cited by President Bush was, quite simply, wrong. There was "evidence" about Saddam trying to get yellow cake (uranium ore) from Nigeria (at least I think it was Nigeria). Completely unfounded; only a small fraction of the experts gave that report any credit. Then there was the one about Saddam getting metal tubes suitable for uranium enrichment. It really was too bad that the tubes were absolutely, completely unsuitable for uranium enrichment. The walls were too thick, the anti-weathering coating on the tubes would make some obvious problems for uranium enrichment. Of course, George Tenet conveniently forgot to tell Bush that all but one CIA expert on the matter thought the idea was total BS. So no, nukes weren't a reason. It was just the hawks rationalize.