Slashdot Mirror
North Korean Defector Spills Details On the Country's Elite Hacking Force
mattydread23 writes Business Insider interviewed Jang Se-yul, a North Korean defector who trained in the country's Mirim University alongside some of the hackers who make up its elite Bureau 121 hacking squad. He explains how they train: 'They take six 90-minute classes every day, learning different coding languages and operating systems, from C to Linux. Jang says a lot of time was spent dissecting Microsoft programs, like the Windows operating system, and how to attack the overall computer IT systems of enemy countries like the U.S. or South Korea.' He also explains that these hackers are among the elite in North Korea, and even though they have unfiltered information about the outside world that their countrymen lack, most of them would never dream of leaving. (See also this story from earlier this month about the life of North Korea's elite hackers.)
I'm also sure the guy who was never in the inner circle knows all the details and isn't making anything up.
Maybe we can torture him to confess a link between North Korea and al Qaeda?
Ho ho ho!
Santa had a hearty laugh when they referred to Linux as an 'operating system'!
GTFO and go back to your troll cave, RMS.
Oh, and merry Christmas!
During the Cold War, how many KGB agents and upper level apparatchiks had unfiltered access to the West and yet stayed?
Love of County is a very powerful emotion, and elitist snobs who dismiss it can not understand a whole panoply of human motivations.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Considering what we learned from Edward Snowden I'd say this is actually the absolute minimum I'd expect them to be doing. When your enemy is the United States, obviously you are going to have strong cyber defence.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
those stories are so hilarious. Best thing is they keep coming and the get funnier.
Obviously most Americans dont remember the non existent WMD in Iraq. Well its the same thing. NK had nothing to do with the Sony debacle.
this is Nayirah al-aba all over again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
CIA/NSA propaganda machine is in full force. I predict US will be "liberating" north Korea in 2015.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
In a country where the internet is about as commonplace as for us having your own rocket launch system in the backyard? Please. How do you hit NKor via internet? Take down their online payment system? Hack their official pages so their citizens would get to see defaced pics of li'l Kim?
How?
I can see that as an offensive force, but defense? Please.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So it isn't me, it is kinda odd that this guy's defection comes conveniently at exactly this point in time?
Some people really know to come right on cue.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They forgot to mention how the final test, called the Kobayashi Maru, involves hacking a Gibson by playing tic-tac-toe while receiving a blow job from Jeff Bridges.
By this point it's not that difficult, because it's Unix and you know this, but making your MacBook interface with the alien computer you built from the schematics sent by Setec Astronomy is a bit of a challenge.
And of course those who fail will be taken away by agents and made to mow the lawn for the rest of their lives or something.
He defected in 2007, if facts matter to you.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
In-house technical training available, daily. Unfiltered access to the internet at work. Nearly 100% retention rate. Must be an awesome place to work!
You overestimate their abilities. The South Korean army alone could take them on and win if they mobilized. The Norks have utterly obsolete military equipment.
The problem is it would not happen without large casualties and probably a bombing of Seoul so I doubt they want to do it.
But South Korea was just as shitty when they made peace with NK, if not worse. It wasn't any better than Saddam's Iraq or Gaddafi's Libya.
Also US did top the Iranian government before - A true democracy replaced by an authoritarian and oppressive regime.
Not again.
Sure they do. But leaving the country and leaving life are often the same in this case. I'm not sure many people would choose to leave. It's my understanding that those people in this group are treated extremely well. Especially compared to the average citizens of North Korea. Plus I'm sure if you have and love your family you're not going to screw it up for them either.
Did you read the article? This defector was as inner circle as it gets without doing the actual haxxorz. Whether he is lying is a different story, but your dismissal is groundless.
What secure OS do you run where the video codecs have had a full security review? Google found (and fixed) around 300 exploitable holes in libavcodec / libavformat in the last year. Do you want to bet that they found them all? Do you always run video codecs in an unprivileged process?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
those stories are so hilarious. Best thing is they keep coming and the get funnier.
Obviously most Americans dont remember the non existent WMD in Iraq. Well its the same thing. NK had nothing to do with the Sony debacle.
Let's not also forget, defectors are great at telling their latest new best friends exactly what their latest new best friends want to hear...
Well, someone did DDOS their entire country offline, taking down their official news outlets etc, so apparently they do need some kind of cyber security force.
In fact they do have an internal network, used by universities and companies, and a 3G mobile network. There is something to defend.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't believe you! I definitely think this hack was an inside job.
Yeah, and global warming is faked by the left wing media, and vaccines are poison, and municipal water flouridation is a communist plot. Oh, and by the way, you don't really believe that you are anonymous here on /., do you?
The South made peace with NK? when did this happen? Clearly you have never been to South Korea. There is an armistice but they are certainly not at "peace". Indeed a few years ago NK shelled an island controlled by the South.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Well, someone did DDOS their entire country offline,
Yeah, all 1000 NK IP addresses were DDOS attacked. The California University of Pennsylvania (you read that right) network dwarfs NK's. The only "defense" they need is some guy to call everyone on a landline to tell them to shut their computer down till tomorrow.
NAT and double NAT. With those 1024 IPs, they can get millions of computers online if they wanted to.
I just can't help but imagine a bunch of Norks gathered around a Tandy 1000 hooked up to an acoustic modem with an egg timer. Every 10 minutes they switch off. "Ok, now you a hacker."
Smug sense of superiority. Are you an American by any chance?
Yes N. Korea is poor, but do not underestimate your enemies. Look at what they've actually done instead of making fun blindly.
Training people in C and Linux and Windows exploits is not all that hard or expensive compared to, say, building your own nuclear warheads and ICBMs. Former can be done for a few million bucks. The latter costs billions and the engineering is orders of magnitude harder than teaching coding.
In case you didn't know, the Norks managed to build their own nukes and also put a satellite in orbit using their own rocket recently.
Yeah, and global warming is faked by the left wing media, and vaccines are poison, and municipal water flouridation is a communist plot. Oh, and by the way, you don't really believe that you are anonymous here on /., do you?
Doubting the official line on the Sony hack is hardly the stuff of tinfoil-hat denialism. How's this for a scenario: (1) Garden-variety haxx0rz and/or a disgruntled employee steal a bunch of embarrassing files from Sony -- plenty of motive there -- and dump the files on the web. (2) Some moron in the media starts speculating that it has something to do with an idiotic movie about North Korea, and the echo chamber amplifies it as truth. (3) Haxx0rz, sensing an epic opportunity for lulz, play along with the feeding frenzy in the media with some crazy threats against screening the movie, then sit back and watch the fun as paranoia in the FBI and mindless nationalism in the population do the rest of their work for them.
Couldn't be.
Actually there were WMD's in Iraq
http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
And America should have nuked whichever country supplied them to Saddam, zero tolerance and such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
don't be pedantic, it was clear he was referring to the nominal end of the Korean War. When the armistice happened, SK was a third world nation. NK was slightly better off due to aid from russia and china.
I've got bug free Microsoft Software for sale.
Dirt cheap!
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
Stop showing off about how much better off you are than the masses!
Damn skite!
Think of the children! ( who may actually have to SEE this film!)