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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."
But what about the NSA?
An acronym of ADD could lead to great jokes about... ... hey wanna go ride bikes?
1. how does north korea get any bandwidth? Do they cross connect with china?
2. what good do mad hacking skills do you when you've just been assigned farm duty?
3. How can you hack with out access to doritos and pepsi?
Everyone knows that the CIA hackers are 31337 and hack people ALL the time! They even hack into computers that aren't even connected to the 'net! I once saw this hacker and he hacked a system so much that it EXPLODED and it KILLED like a million people! And that was just with his pinky. And I knew right then he had to be a CIA hacker d00d. And I asked him. And he hacked my laptop which was OFF and closed AND HAD no battery! And he did it just by looking at it and he scowled and he turned around and then he hacked a park bench and then digitally vanished. And when I opened my laptop it said "I'm a CIA hacker d00d and am 31337. Tell n0 0n3." Oh crap... ,mnb,b4, #$$# NO CARRIER>>>
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"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.
One of the reasons we removed Saddam from power was to prevent him from getting nuclear weapons and becoming another Kim Jong-il. You seem to ask why we didn't liberate North Korea instead of Iraq. The reason is simple - if we go after North Korea then millions of our allies in South Korea will die. Seoul is very close to the border, and NK has a ton of missiles aimed at the SK capital right now - possibly some nuclear missiles. Right now the only way to deal with NK is to use diplomacy and to isolate Jong-il from the rest of the world. As each year passes, the world advances and becomes richer while NK stays stuck in 1950 forever. We can afford to wait this one out.
Don't say this too loud. I live in the Seattle area and know a guy in the storage locker business. A few years back when it was reported that N. Korea had a missle that *might* reach the U.S., he suddenly got flooded with requests for storage space from people wanting to move out of the area quickly. Many of them reported concern that we might get nuked real soon. While this might not necessarily be a bad thing if they took out Fremont, I seriously doubt that it would happen in my lifetime. It's really kind of funny when you think about it - there's the Cascadia Subduction Zone just off the Washington coast just waiting to deliver a magnitude 9.0 quake to this region and these guys are worried about N. Korea. I don't get why people worry about remote possibilities when there are real threats just around the corner.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
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/
they're in their mothers basements.
"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?
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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
In two years, the all-volunteer force will have had such a nightmare in recruiting for the festering Iraq occupation that the U.S. military will be stretched even THINNER than it is today.
Iraq was supposed to be a pushover, with terrain perfectly suited for the U.S. (see Gulf War I), had only Russia as a half-hearted partner.
North Korea has been girding for this fight ever since the Korean War armistice. They have a major Asian capital held hostage by 50 years worth of artillery emplacements. They are also right in China's backyard, and China, while completely uninterested in the North Korean regime, doesn't want some flood of hungry refugees when they are busy dealing with millions of their own rural workers looking for jobs. That's why none of this has gone to the U.N.: China has enough power to keep the U.S. from steamrolling them; Russia had no choice but to let Iraq get smacked around.
The U.S. would certainly prevail in a North Korean war, but millions of Koreans would die, with untold damage to a major economy. Samsung, LG, Hyundai, etc., are real economic players [try naming an Iraqi multinational]. Now, Japan getting nuked by North Korean warheads might be equally disastrous, so there is at least one way this could spiral out of control, but this is a war that NOBODY wants.
That said, the Bush administration has been bungling the situation from day 1, particularly because the proper order of threats was 1) North Korea, 2a) Al-qaeda 2b) Pakistan 3) Iran 4) Iraq, and they started at #4, put #2b on the wrong list, and by attacking #4 managed to spook #3 and #1 enough to make the situation even trickier. Their only policy achievement in NK is a totally non-functional diplomatic arrangement that they screw up with the most childish kind of namecalling.They may very well bungle enough to get the war they don't want.
I don't get why people worry about remote possibilities when there are real threats just around the corner.
Same reason I drink Diet Coke with my cheeseburger.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
I'm pretty sure that the CIA's job these days is just to tell Bush whatever it is he wants to hear.
According to this New Yorker article, Bush and the CIA don't like each other. Bush basically made his own personal Intelligence Agency inside the Pentagon. The President pretends that this "task force" doesn't have to provide answers about their acts to Congress.From the article: