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.

Re:"acts of war"

[Xest]

The issue is it lowers the barrier to starting a war, which may mean more wars.

If a kid in say, Iran hacks into some US infrastructure off his own back and causes damage then with the US' venemous hate of the country, is it sensible that they then fire back with conventional weapons such as a cruise missile? Isn't that a dangerous precedent for escalation?

Do you draw the line at whether it's state sponsored? what about when you get politicians crying state sponsorship and pushing for war when it's not?

Honestly, the best option is to make sure your infrastructure isn't vulnerable in the first place. Take critical infrastructure like power plants offline so they can't be hacked via the internet and so forth.

Creating conditions where any of 6.5bn people on the planet can unilaterally start a war from the comfort of their bedroom is pretty fucking stupid IMHO.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Geoffrey.landis]

So, the totalitarian state with a complete control of the news sends its best and most idealistic young men outside the country, to learn about the internet, with the idea that they will go back home and use their knowledge to destroy the foreign enemies.

A fiendish plan. How could it possibly go wrong?

Who was the audience

[JinjaontheNile]

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

Re:Who was the audience

[cold fjord]

Defector says something host country wants to hear

Who would of thought such a thing would happen?.

You apparently. Only accurate information is useful. And, of course, I'm sure it would never occur to you that the information would be cross-checked? That's what I figured.....

Re:Who was the audience

[JinjaontheNile]

Your lack of cynicism is awe inspiring
Which story would sell more papers "North Koreans get scholarship to study computing abroad" or "North Korean CyberWarriors being train abroad"
Only information that agrees with a predetermined position is useful (in politics anyway)
Case in point, the information from defectors that formed the Iraqi National Congress.
All the information was in complete disagreement with the UN weapons Inspections - Guess which group was denigrated?
yep the one that disagreed with the predetermined position
There are many other examples I could choose (creationism anyone)
Basically, if you don't know the underlying reason for a statement, you have no chance of determining the probability of truth
My bias is simple, I hate the term cyberwarrior
(Cyber anything = tabloid shit = don't trust)

Re:Who was the audience

[Richard_at_work]

Accurate information is everything. Unfortunately, the British and US intelligence agencies pushed for war based on such wonderful intelligence like some poor chaps university essay, hearsay and outright lies.

I wonder if the costly embarrassment that was the Iraq invasion could have been avoided if actual cross-checking had taken place...

Learn it from whom?

[betterunixthanunix]

Who do they think these guys are going to learn from? Most of the "hacker underground" just wants some lulz or quick and easy cash these days. If the North Koreans think they are going to get their spies in touch with the Stuxnet authors, they have another thing coming.

More stick than carrot

[blind biker]

If you think the psychopathic dictators in North Korea use carrots to keep expats loyal, you're crazy. Their families are held hostage - to the extreme. These expats know full well that, should they fail to return, their families will be moved to one of many NK concentration camps (best scenario) or just summarily executed (more likely).

Re:More stick than carrot

[cold fjord]

And remember kids, the places outside the prison camps are the "garden spots" of North Korea, with a much better night life, and day life, or any life at all, for that matter.

Re:Meanwhile...

[gmuslera]

If those are obstacles for you then you are not qualified.

Re:Why? we had no Y2K issue in the 90's.

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was a 19100 issue.

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.

Re:Meanwhile...

[girlintraining]

If those are obstacles for you then you are not qualified.

Until recently, being gay made you not qualified. Do you think every barrier to entry is justified, or is it just possible that our military is being inflexible and depriving themselves of talent because of it?

A person's age, sex, sexual orientation, poor eyesight, or even disability isn't a hinderance in this line of work: all that is required is a brain and a way of getting information in and out of it. Every asset the military deprives themselves of because of their ass-backwards recruitment policy is another one that other interests can (and will) take advantage of.

And before you start yammering with the same tired crap about "not being qualified" ... there's ample history and recent evidence to support the notion that terrorists and foreign interests heavily recruit people who fail to meet said qualifications. Oh yeah, and they pay better too.

One last thing: Just remember that China has more honors students than we have students. Can we really afford to be that picky in this theatre?

Re:They can't do squat

[nospam007]

Exactly, 3 weeks out of North Korea and they'll never go back.

Re:Let's rephrase this.

[anagama]

N. Korea has no oil (*), nor is it in any shipping lanes. It's safe.

Libya: oil exporter
Iraq: oil exporter
Afghanistan: Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (proposed Natural Gas route)

(*) Well maybe a little -- an estimated 12 million barrels: http://www1.korea-np.co.jp/pk/072nd_issue/98120202.htm
For context, the US burns 19.15m barrels per day, so N. Korea's potential reserves amount to about a 15 hour supply for the US. In other words, N. Korea has no oil.

Re:Let's rephrase this.

[bky1701]

"WHO IS NOT allowed to have a military (Plus they have the balls to use the word "dong" to name their missile name... Type-of-Dong which would make getting deep-throated by one that much more humiliating) 5) Any threat to Japan is a threat to the US who is in charge of protecting them in exchange for giving up the military."

Totally false. Japan spends almost as much on their military as the United Kingdom. They just don't call it one.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?cid=GPD_42

Japan: (1/100)*5068996399491 = 5.07 10^10 UK: 2174529808278*(2.7/100) = 5.87 10^10

By some (possibly more reliable) estimates, it is more: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/japan/jda.htm

Re:War

[gman003]

Actually, the state of war is officially recognized. The Korean War has not yet officially ended - while a cease-fire and an armistice were signed, a peace treaty has not, and neither side has withdrawn their declaration of war. And, as the numerous infiltration tunnels violated Article 1, Paragraphs 7-9 of the Korean Armistice Agreement, and the Yeonpyeong shelling violated Article 2, Paragraph 12, you could argue that even the armistice has been abrogated, and that a full state of war legally exists.