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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."
My God folks, how is this news? Is anyone really surprised that a militant nation engages in information warfare?
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
maybe if the CIA wasn't using such out dated software and dedicated so much of their time searching for the evils of the world then they could catch up on their reading and protect us from larger threats than a plane going into a building. I'm sure there is some pretty smart guys in the CIA, but what motive to they have to improve their skills? I'm too tired to put much more thought into this but this is nothing surprising we all know the russians are way better than us as well. By the way how are the people working on stem cells comparing the rest of the world right now. . . about the same that figures. this is my 2 cents for the moment, please mister CIA guys don't come knocking on my door, i've gotta go to sleep before work tomarrow.
Force of Will = Glue 'nuff said.
"a five-year school that has been turning out about 100 cyber warfare specialists a year since 1981" -- back in 1981 computers weren't very prevalent and hackers were a minor nuisance at worst. The Internet was limited strictly to research labs and universities, I strongly doubt that NK even had a single internet connection in the whole country back in 1981. Yet they were turning out 100 cyber warriors per year?
This is a joke. If North Korea did try a "cyber attack" on America we could cut off their internet with a pair of scissors. The average cable modem user in America has more bandwidth than their entire country. It's hard to afford computers and network access when 99.9% of your GDP goes to support your military and feed your people.
"Iraq has the 4th largest army in the world". That's what they kept telling us before the first Iraq war.
Now North Korea has an almost as big army of hackers as US...
Pattern or coincidence?
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
I mean first it's the NSA that concerns itself with electrionic intelligence, not the CIA. The CIA is about human intelligence. Also an offensive tasking seems like it would more likely be a DoD thing, Airforce maybe though who knows. NSA/CIA are more about intelligence gathering than any kind of direct offensive support, at least offically.
At any rate, how the hell would this guy have any idea how good they are, espically given he can't keep the agencies straight? I mean the NSA is very secretive, they don't say much on how they operate, what particularly they do, etc. The nature of an intelligence agency. What's more, there hasn't been a conflict where any sort of US syber warfare division would have had much to do to demonstrate their prowess.
So we have no information on training, no public demonstrations of capabilities, and no wartime demonstrations. Ok, great, so basically anything we say about it is total specualtion. The US's capability could be anything from three teenagers playing Counterstrike all day to a huge team of the best trained hackers in the world. There's just no way to know.
So it looks like this guy is talking out his ass on the US capabilities, which makes me think he's probably doing the same on North Korean capabilites. I mean they may have lots, they may have none, but who knows?
However it really seems to be of little concern, given that North Korea has little Internet access to their nation. I mean people in the US and Europe tend to take for granted the large number of well connected providers around, that's not the case in NK. It wouldn't take much to totally cut them off from the rest of the Internet.
Besdies, in theory at least, all US military control and all classified data travels on networks physically seperate from the Internet. Goes back to the Kennedy assanation where the government found the PSTN so clogged they couldn't communicate and so worke don getting their own. Today the policy, and hopefulyl the implementation, is an air gap: physical seperation of classified networks from the Internet. So a "cyber attack" might screw a bunch of people with in secure comptuers for a couple days, but it wouldn't stop the B-2s from comming.
North Korea is known to be actively trying to achieve nuclear weapons.
North Korea is known to have killed thousands, if not millions of its own people thanks to its goverment (predominately famine).
North Korea is run by a complete and utter barking mad nutter.
So nuclear weapons... that puts them up with first world nations from the... 1940s and 50s. They have a rocket that can't even make it to Japan and their leader is much more interested in self-publicity and oppressing his population than almost anything else.
Having 500 "hackers" trying to compromise networks in the west... well they've been SPECTACULARLY successfull haven't they with all the networks they've caused to fail over the last few years.
North Korea is a Bad Country(tm) but lets not believe what South Korea says. We know that North Korea has no RADAR worth talking of as the US have deployed stealth fighters, which means the radar must be 20+ years out of date.
Backward country, backward leader, backward tech. They could build a huge amount (see South Korea) if they just stopped killing their own people, fortunately for all of us (and unfortunately for N Koreans) their leader appears to quite like doing the killing and posturing, more than actually delivering.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Aside from the fact that that's a mostly meaningless statement, perhaps he was referring to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA).
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Night vs. Day.
South Korea is the most "connected" nation in the world, with some 80% of households having broadband, and the average broadband connection being 4 MBits/s.
North Korea, well, can hardly feed themselves.
Take a look at North Korea vs South Korea in this NASA "Earth at night" image; it's really telling. South Korea is amongst brightest countries in the world, while North Korea is just this sudden dark, dark "void" sitting conspicuously between South Korea and China.