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North Korea Is Blackmailing Top South Korean Online Retailer For $2.66 Million (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Softpedia: South Korea says that North Korea is behind a data breach that occurred last May, where hackers stole details about 10 million user accounts from Interpark.com, one of the country's biggest shopping portals. The hackers later tried to extort Interpark management by requesting for 3 billion won ($2.66 million / 2.39 million euros), otherwise they were going to release the data on the internet. [The hackers wanted the money transferred to their accounts as Bitcoin.] Authorities say they tracked the source of the hack to an IP in North Korea, previously used in other attacks on South Korean infrastructure. "Besides the evidence related to the IP addresses and the techniques used in the attacks, investigators also said that the emails Interpark management received, written in the Korean language, contained words and vocabulary expressions that are only used in the North," reports Softpedia.
I'm sorry but when you don't take your customers' security seriously, don't complain when someone walks through the front door and steals the stuff you left lying around. The hackers are wrong, but it's the store's own damned fault. They'd rather make more profit than pay for serious security. Shows what they think of their clients.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
We're going to launch a missile, and S. Korea is going to pay for it!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I pretty much think they well could. I actually lived in a communist country for quite a long while and I personally, first-hand, know how things worked there. "Control by the government" is a grossly overstated illusion.
The fact of the matter is, the guards, especially the ones working "in the field" and whose tasks are to control the actual people rather then organize the whole process, are usually recruited from these proverbial illiterate peasants, so the educated city dwellers could very easily find the loopholes in the written and unwritten laws and customs to do whatever the hell they please, especially if they are criminally minded. There's always a way to conceal what you do on the internet from a low-ranked guard tasked in controlling you, because you know your computer system in and out and he doesn't. In order to get you scrutinized by the higher-level (and educated) officials this guard would need something more than just a suspicion of your wrong-doing. Provoke his suspicion three times in a row without actually doing anything "prohibited", watch his angry superiors investigate the empty suspicion and shut him up for good; after that you're free to do whatever. That's just one way of doing things, there are many others.
It only appears that totalitarian governments control the crime, the reality is rather far from that appearance.
My initial post was intended as a sarcasm regarding the well-ingrained mindset among the Westerners (not only Americans) that regards the people in the communist and ex-communist countries as some kind of untermenschen, a mere drones at the command of their Supreme Leaders. The replies I received here so far only underscores the assessment that this mindset is pretty much alive and unshaken.