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The Rise of North Korea's Hacking Army
- scottfits 6y agoin the face of sanctions, NK has to get creative. Sad that a generation of talented people is basically harvested by the gov for hacking and theft "The process by which North Korean hackers are spotted and trained appears to be similar to the way Olympians were once cultivated in the former Soviet bloc. Martyn Williams, a fellow at the Stimson Center think tank who studies North Korea, explained that, whereas conventional warfare requires the expensive and onerous development of weaponry, a hacking program needs only intelligent people. And North Korea, despite lacking many other resources, “is not short of human capital."
- sammorrowdrums 6y agoI went to a talk by a couple of defectors, one of which was an embassy employee and they explained that they were always tasked with earning money through means like selling illegal alcohol etc. sanctions obviously make legal trade impossible with many countries.
- BelenusMordred 6y agoFrom what I understood there is a huge flow of drugs like meth from NK into China. They are basically just a mafia state who will do anything for money.
- dmingod666 6y agoAs opposed to America? Which does wars to protect its dollar hegemony and loot oil around the world. Toppling democracies to install puppet dictators.
- usefulcat 6y agoParent said nothing about the US. You have a valid point, but there are far better ways to make it than with this complete non-sequitur.
- yesenadam 6y agoYes, but.. it doesn't seem completely a complete non-sequitur. Thoughts about whataboutism: When you say "Y is basically just a mafia state who will do anything for money", there seems an unspoken premise "My country X is not like that/is better than that." And to someone to whom X is not better than Y in that respect, the initial claim sounds like "Y is evil because they have two legs", when X has two legs also. It sounds ignorantly hypocritical. How else to point out "Uh, but you also have two legs, although you're acting like you don't."? The problem wasn't that the first claim wasn't true, but that it was spoken in a hypocritical way, saying one party is bad for a reason which applies equally to the other party. And to someone to whom both parties seem to have the bad condition, before they can hear or really respond to the "Y is bad" claim, you really have to deal with—justify—your own unspoken premise of "My own country X doesn't do the bad thing." Just saying "But X also does the same bad thing!" gets accused of whataboutism, as here. "Parent said nothing about X". True, not explicitly, but X appeared in the unspoken premises. Which loom large if you think one or more of them false. I'm not sure what the solution is. I guess maybe saying "I think you have an unspoken premise, which seems false to me, that your country X doesn't do the bad thing you are accusing Y of" at least has a milder tone.
- frashelaw 6y agoNorth Korean defectors are paid by South Korean govt and US-funded orgs in order to push propaganda about North Korea. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-k... https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-22/problem-north-korea-s-celebrity-defectors https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-22/problem-north-korea-s...
- WalterGR 6y agoNeither of those links support your claims.
- mrobot 6y agoHere is a video that contains some accusations of bribery of defectors and other shady business by NIS (Korean CIA) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktE_3PrJZO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktE_3PrJZO0
- m00x 6y agoAh yes, Youtube. A trusted source of information.
- techrat 6y ago"Youtube" itself is not a source of information. It is a site where people post videos. Journalists post videos on Youtube through BBC, Economist, Washington Post, Nightline/PBS, etc... Does their posting content on Youtube make them less credible? Judge the originator of the content, not who hosts it. Might as well go "Ah yes, the internet. A trusted source of information." That's how shallow your retort is.
- jxramos 6y agoI'm curious what the AsianBoss would make of the video. His interviews with defectors always seemed so genuine. https://www.youtube.com/user/askasianboss https://www.youtube.com/user/askasianboss
- hnbad 6y agoRegardless of whether the accusations about defectors being coerced to make North Korea sound worse are true, honestly this just sounds like an obvious consequence. If you isolate a country economically by cutting off all legal ways for it to trade with the international community, it will have to rely on illegal ways. Generalized trade sanctions have time and again proven to be ineffective because they are so indiscriminate. They're meant to work as a deterrent, not a punishment. But the deterrent works with the threat of disrupting the economy, which only works short-term as the existing supply chains come to a halt and businesses panic. If you sit the sanctions out long enough, the economy will have already collapsed and will rebuild itself under the new restrictions. Once the economy has adapted, the sanctions are no longer a deterrent, they're just how things are, and the promise of conditionally lifting the sanctions feels like a trap because it would require changes to the economy that would again make it vulnerable to those sanctions if they were reinstated.
- catgary 6y agoYour heart just breaks for those kids competing in the IMO. Their peers from other nations are going to go to college, maybe stick with math but they have a million opportunities ahead of them to use their talents. Meanwhile these kids are getting conscripted into being crooks. I really can’t imagine how bitter that would make me feel.
- movedx 6y ago> Meanwhile these kids are getting conscripted into being crooks They're not crooks from their perspective. They're indoctrinated into hating the west, remember. As far as they're concerned they're likely to feel they're serving their nation and doing a good deed.
- catgary 6y agoI don’t know - did every Soviet mathematician buy into their propaganda?
- phobosanomaly 6y agoYou can enjoy the intellectual challenge of what you do, while understanding that the political context of it is bullshit.
- movedx 6y agoWhat?
- willvarfar 6y agoVery tangential, but the story of Jim Simons is interesting. He was an American cryptographer who took a very public stance against the Vietnam War. Being forced to leave, he went and set up the world's most successful hedge fund, became a billionaire and led the nerdification of trading. There are lots of really really interesting interviews with him on YouTube.
- hnbad 6y agoWell, enough Americans do for the NSA and CIA to have plenty of highly intelligent math geeks on staff. Or did you think the US doesn't do propaganda?
- filomeno 6y ago> Sad that a generation of talented people is basically harvested by the gov for hacking and theft What's wrong with that? Would it be better if they were harvested by corporations to just make far more questionable things?
- FredPret 6y agoProducts and services are far more questionable than hacking and theft?
- wongarsu 6y ago"harvested for hacking and theft" in the same sense that any military "harvests people to turn them into killing machines"? You could equally well frame it as "they are given a chance to do their patriotic duty", "they serve their country", "they are given an amazing job opportunity". Your wording isn't wrong, but it is an unusually harsh way to describe a military operation.
- andrewzah 6y agoIt's only bad when we don't like that country, I suppose.
- codezero 6y agoAt one point I noticed a lot of people from North Korea openly registered and active on Hacker Rank and I wondered how Hacker Rank was allowed to let them use their platform.
- SXX 6y agoDon't you think it's just people can set their country to North Korea just for fun?
- codezero 6y agoI am confident these were legit.
- zerkten 6y agoI can't imagine they have a very strong compliance focus. What gave them away in particular, or where they just operating in the open?
- codezero 6y agoWide open.
- masijo 6y agoWhy wouldn't they allow it, though?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/ppiy0 https://archive.is/ppiy0
- Guereric 6y agoOn every thread with a paywalled site, I appreciate the kindness you show by linking an archive copy.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThis is my favorite black swan event for Coinbase: NK decides to infiltrate and steal all the BTC.
- throwastrike 6y agoAnd then BTC goes to ZERO.
- eloff 6y agoSurely most of it is in cold wallets of some kind that can't be stolen that way - or has nothing been learned since Mt Gox?
- uyt 6y agoCan't they just kidnap an employee or two and make them add backdoors? It's not completely implausible given what happened to Otto Warmbier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Warmbier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Warmbier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rZkdPXP6H4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rZkdPXP6H4
- nexuist 6y agoNo, because cold wallets are stored in a physical location without software interaction. They'd have to do what essentially amounts to a terrorist attack in order to break into that location, subdue all the guards, steal all the wallets, etc. Which would basically be a declaration of war if it could be linked back to a specific country.
- dillondoyle 6y agoand insured?
- optimalsolver 6y agoThe pressing question is how do we rescue Tea Girl from North Korea? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF2gswLeuPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF2gswLeuPQ
- keithnz 6y agoI wonder if any are active on hacker news. Seems like the backdoor potential of making contact with people deep inside some of the worlds significant tech companies is pretty good on here.
- calvinmorrison 6y agoYou're gonna be shocked when you find out McCarthy was actually right about a bunch of infiltrators...
- lostlogin 6y agoIf they are on here, is that the communists infiltrating the capitalists or the capitalists infiltrating the communists?
- eplanit 6y agoIt's true. Folks should look up the Venona Project and the decrypted intercepts from that era. Far beyond Hall and Sachs spying at Los Alamos, there were indeed many spies throughout the government (it was the height of the Cold War, after all). Similarly, although Nixon was famously paranoid, he was also right about the soviets fomenting and amplifying vietnam war discord, too.
- v8dev123 6y agoMaybe but it will be like Stephen Hawking hosting a party for time travelers.
- jasonhansel 6y ago> The malware consisted of rows of seemingly random letters and numbers flowing down a page, in pairs. In the margins were some recognizable English-language words—“Windows,” “everyone”—connected by cryptic punctuation. Choi could fluently and sensitively parse all this. So...it was a hex dump?
- nkozyra 6y agoAh yes, the hacker's secret cryptographical weapon! (It certainly reads that way)
- sn41 6y agoMust be an advanced hacker tool if it shows in "margins". My hex dump shows it only in one margin. /s
- wahern 6y agoThe canonical (-C) output for BSD hexdump(1) formats data like this: 00000000 54 68 65 20 71 75 69 63 6b 20 62 72 6f 77 6e 20 |The quick brown | 00000010 66 6f 78 20 6a 75 6d 70 73 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74 |fox jumps over t| 00000020 68 65 20 6c 61 7a 79 20 64 6f 67 |he lazy dog| This is also a common default format for many hex editors. The visual representation columns--which display all isgraph(3) ASCII values as their ASCII character, and every other 8-bit value as "."--could be interpreted by lay readers as a margin that decodes the octal and hexadecimal values which take up the 4/5ths of the 78-column display.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MaximumYComb 6y agoInterestingly, malware often hides these strings with different types of obfuscation.
- anthk 6y agoHaving that "security joke" enforced by the South called "ActiveX", North Korea had it really easy to collapse SK down a la Blaster/Sasser way.
- Veserv 6y agoWell of course, hacking is an activity that has by far the most leverage both criminally and militarily in the modern era. For ~$1M you can successfully attack and completely compromise essentially any Fortune 500 company in the world. For ~$1M you could target the current model year of any brand of car in the world and develop a remote attack to simultaneously target every car of that model year at rush-hour and engage the cruise control at maximum speed, engage the anti-lock braking to disable the brakes, and, if applicable, engage the autosteer to turn slightly into oncoming traffic as these researchers [1] demonstrated could be done 5 years ago on a budget of only $80k. For ~$1M-10M you could likely target the most popular types of generators used in a power grid and at the very least deactivate if not disable their software governors and over-rev them to destroy them as demonstrated by the DoD 14 years ago [2] and as militarily deployed by Russia against Ukraine [3] which could result in the loss of power for months if sufficiently widespread. At the very least our internet-connected stoves with remote turn-on [4] are safe since, as we all know, the software developers for stoves are the best minds of our generation so it would cost far more than the ~$1M to hack a Fortune 500 company to remotely turn on the gas at 2 AM in the morning and then the igniter at 3 AM with results like this: WARNING [5][6]. For less than the price of a tank any government can develop a weapons system that is comparable in power to a full scale nuclear first strike that you can deploy instantly in your enemy's territory. Not just that it can be tuned to any scale of destruction you want from an individual all the way up to full scale nuclear strike, and it can be done untraceably or, even better, you can pin it on one of your other enemies as the CIA had the capability to do [7]. Frankly, any government not feverishly developing such weapons systems given that they only cost a few measly million to develop for the immense capabilities they provide is either ignorant or fighting the last war. This is The Tool that a small nation can use to achieve parity with superpowers given their miniscule cost and immense leverage. [1] https://www.wired.com/2016/08/jeep-hackers-return-high-speed-steering-acceleration-hacks/ https://www.wired.com/2016/08/jeep-hackers-return-high-speed... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GSEchbDuB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GSEchbDuB8 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2015_Ukraine_power_grid_cyberattack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2015_Ukraine_power_gr... [4] https://www.geappliances.com/ge/connected-appliances/ranges-ovens-cooking.htm https://www.geappliances.com/ge/connected-appliances/ranges-... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2JPLMzQjkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2JPLMzQjkk [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX9-puUjoDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX9-puUjoDU [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7#UMBRAGE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7#UMBRAGE
- decafninja 6y agoI'm Korean American; my dad is an elder at a big Korean American church. Several years ago a missionary came asking for donations of computers which he would take to North Korea to teach computer skills. In any case, my dad called for a meeting of the church leadership and put a stop to it, but that was a big WTF moment. Is sending computer equipment and/or teaching North Koreans computer skills even legal from the US standpoint? I don't remember if said missionary was an American citizen or a South Korean one. The same goes for a lot of aid that gets sent there. That people are suffering there is tragic, but it is so easy for aid to be diverted to primarily benefit the Kim dynasty and its closest circles while the majority of the country doesn't reap the benefits.
- nemo44x 6y agoAt some point I imagine the best thing we could do, besides ignorethem, is to send weapons. Have the CIA arrange gun and bomb smuggling operations; airdrop rifles and ammunition and rations if needed. Give the people an opportunity to revolt and if they choose not to then let them live the life they want.
- jhwang5 6y agoIt's actually possible that the NK hackers are taking blame on behalf of CCP. Would take too long to explain fully. Just imagine NK as a "blame proxy" for CCP when it comes to the edgiest operations
- phobosanomaly 6y agoSounds plausible, but is there any sort of evidence or indication that this is happening?
- redis_mlc 6y agoThe US press paints N. Korea as a rogue nation, but it's not. N. Korea is a client (vassal) state of China. The CCP is involved in N. Korea because: 1) It's a border buffer country, which has security implications and is the main reason China invaded Korea during the Korean War. 2) China doesn't want millions of starving refugees crossing their border. 3) As a client state, N. Korea will adhere to CCP ideology directives. The CCP can summon N. Korean leadership any time it wants to. 4) The CCP doesn't care if N. Korea launches nuclear weapons at the US since that has always been the ideological goal of the CCP. (Mao was angry when Russia removed their nukes from Cuba.) So questions like, "Is N. Korea taking blame for CCP hacking" or vice versa is not significant since they work in concert anyway. You might as well ask, "Do Russia and Cuba agree on trade?"
- ZoomerCretin 6y agoThis kind of justification for the North Korean embargo is disgusting. The world is inflicting poverty upon this people to punish the government for the grave sin of not bowing to US hegemony.
- dmingod666 6y agoExactly. How come the sins of all US allies are washed away but ruin is imposed upon countries that don't join the US-Europe political block. First you impose sanctions to make people suffer and then point to this and say how cruel their leaders are. Saddam was an ally and did nothing wrong, then he was not and he became a tyrant.
- fermienrico 6y agoWhat's with astonishing praise for evil just for the sake of sticking it to the status quo? Completely orthogonal to any US allies and their action, it is absolutely disingenius to dismiss the evils of Saddam's empire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLUktJbp2Ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLUktJbp2Ug. There is a large body of work around Saddam's regime, this YT clip isn't provided as an evidence, but to show how misplaced it is to say "Saddam did nothing wrong". I find this an ongoing problem on HN. There are 2 counter acting forces A and B. Objectively, B is evil. But, HN equates A and B on the same level and demands equal criticism of both just by the virtue of the fact that A and B are up for a discussion. I am sure there is a list of biases being violated. It's similar to the debate between flat earth deniers and believers. If we host a debate between them, there is a perceived notion that both parties are on the same footing. The truth couldn't be far from that.
- dmingod666 6y agoIf you re-read my statement it doesn't justify or praise Saddam. "Saddam did nothing wrong" in the eyes of the US.. like Salman did nothing wrong that is worthy of punishment in the journalist murder case, from the US point of view. It merely states that the US will happily create, fund and tolerate monsters, but the moment their are political enemies they suddenly become devil incarnate. Happily fund and arm bin-laden, and extreme fundamental ideologies and then turn around and claim the high moral ground. Today KSA can do no wrong and Iran can do nothing right. Tomorrow if KSA switches sides, then they will suddenly become evil tyrants that have regressive views and torture their people. It's not A vs B is a flawed comparison. It's A makes B, both are evil and roll around happily in the mud. A then claims moral superiority and is called out on it's bullshit.
- hellbannedguy 6y agoThey have missles pointed at South Korea, and the USA. The dictator teaches his people Americans are evil, and must be destroyed. The dictatorship is actively teaching citizens hacking skills--aimed at ruining American lives. So no---don't give them anything other than food, and medicine.
- swarnie_ 6y agoI mean... You have genocide'd your way across the world since the 40s, dear leader may have a point.
- frockington1 6y agoPlease cite US involvement in a genocide since the 40s. Kind of an odd timeline to pick considering other US histories
- alexilliamson 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Indonesia?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Indonesia?wp...
- ok123456 6y agoThe 2003 invasion of Iraq has killed 500,000 civilians. The sanctions on Cuba over the past 70 years have curtailed their access to food and medical equipment. Beat policemen in America can have a "bad day" and execute someone they feel "threatened" by with near impunity. They happen to feel threatened by people with extra melanin more often than not. In the 1940s, the start of the epoch you specified, we put Japanese in camps. You can just imagine what would have happened if there was a mainland invasion of the country. Are those genocidal enough for you?
- swarnie_ 6y agoIts hard to narrow down my picks but ill go with the big 3. 500k Iraqis 2000k Vietnamizes 300k Afghanis This is ignoring any "indirect" involvement in many, many coups in south America. I honestly think the world would be safer if you fucked off for 50 years or so. Find a pet project closer to home you're interested in, those Mexican kids won't put themselves in cages after all.
- evanphamilton 6y agoSome funny metaphors and descriptions in the article. Seems like the author is grasping a bit to make programming relatable. "The coding and the analytical skills on display at such events were like the Force in the “Star Wars” movies: it could be used for the light side, or for the dark." "He spoke about the Stuxnet code in the way that an art historian might discuss “The Night Watch”: it was “elegant,” “precise,” “sophisticated.”" "The malware consisted of rows of seemingly random letters and numbers flowing down a page, in pairs. In the margins were some recognizable English-language words—“Windows,” “everyone”—connected by cryptic punctuation. Choi could fluently and sensitively parse all this."
- kvathupo 6y agoI've been consistently impressed with the quality of the New Yorker's recent reporting on North Korea. I highly recommend this piece on Liberty In North Korea's Yale-educated Mexican founder, who is leading a militant, provisional North Korean government [1]. [1] -https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/23/the-underground-movement-trying-to-topple-the-north-korean-regime https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/23/the-undergroun...
- rmac 6y agoThis article missed the recent social engineering attack dprk carried out against cyber security researchers: https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/prominent-cybersecurity-researchers-among-those-targeted-in-north-korean-hacking-campaign https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/prominent-cybersecurity-r... Their social engineering skills are impressive!