North Korea Training "Cyberwarriors" Abroad

jfruhlinger writes "A North Korean defector claims that the secretive totalitarian state is nurturing a team of "cyberwarriors," identifying young people with computer skills and sending them abroad to learn the latest hacking techniques, while lavishing privileges on their families at home to keep them loyal. This could lead to an escalation in tensions, especially given that the US military believes that cyberattacks from foreign countries constitute acts of war."

Comments

"acts of war"

[nurb432]

Well, if its state sponsored, i have to agree. An attack on a countries infrastructure is still war.

Re:"acts of war"

[Chicken_Kickers]

Yes, and remember citizens, if They do it, it is an act of war but if We do it, then it is cybersecurity and intelligence gathering.

Seriously, at this point, any country not training or hiring CyberWarriors(TM) is behind the times. Except of course American media likes to be jingoistic and xenophobic, what else is new?

Re:"acts of war"

[lightknight]

Maybe. But they are running out of white elephants. They need a new enemy, and they need a new one NOW! How else are they going to justify the 2014 budget?

Crackers / Hackers / Hacktivists (bleh!) are one of those groups that people don't really understand (like Muslims, Chinese, etc.) that makes it easy to say "THEY CAN DO BAD THINGS, JUST LOOK AT THEM!" and no one really knows them well-enough to say otherwise. A little priming ("they might be working with drug dealers and arms smugglers...child pornography and human trafficking"), and the media will take to it the way cancer takes to a prostate gland. That civil rights are being strip-mined and purses looted to fuel these witch hunts does not matter; all that matters is that the Good Guys win in the end. And that the guys with guns and small brains get paid. We really haven't progressed from a feudal society, have we?

You can't make a typical Marine into a cyber security expert; the skill-sets for either are almost mutually exclusive. This, of course, does not prevent people from buying security certs and taking pointless low-level courses in basic networking, then declaring themselves security experts. Nor will it prevent the congress critters from lavishing their favorite security firms with outlandish contracts which provide no real security.

I'm not saying that you can't train a Marine into a cyber security expert; what I'm saying is that for every 1 Marine you manage to successfully train, you will have 40,000 hackers / crackers, with higher levels of expertise in the relevant fields, ready to bitch-slap him and his friends off the internet. I think the US government has more to fear from its own people here than foreign governments; and screwing around where it doesn't belong is only going to cause them to lose control that much faster.

Remember, you have lots of underemployed CS / IT people here in the US, because their jobs got sent overseas. Factor in a screwed up currency and a never-ending recession. You end up with down-trodden, under-payed, over-worked, and typically highly-trained in all that technology class of people. Now tell them that the US government is going to help make things more secure, by mandating that a bunch of ill-trained marines have backdoor access to every important system in the US. That they need to keep port 23423 open at all times, or they will be fined. That they need to configure their systems to use some officially sanctioned software for virus protection, because someone in DC managed to pass a law mandating it.

They will get a war, but it won't be the one they are preparing for.

Who was the audience

[JinjaontheNile]

Defector says something host country wants to hear
Who would of thought such a thing would happen? . .

Re:Don't worry

[TubeSteak]

The US has already got their cyber warriors in training for this. They are using the highly sophisticate program/simulation game called "Homefront"

Unfortunately for the USA, 'cyber war' is another form of asymmetrical warfare where the USA's massive budget can't help them.
Hacker teams require relatively little in the way of resources, while allowing weak militaries to punch far above their weight.
Worse, a country like North Korea has minimal internet exposure compared to the USA's massive reliance on the internet.

"Act of War"

[savi]

except when such cyber warfare is directed at Iran by a join Israel/U.S. operation. Then it's just ... uh. Definitely not war.