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Lifetimes ago as an intelligence officer I spent years tracking DPRK activities and developments. People shouldn’t underestimate their technical capacities or

Lifetimes ago as an intelligence officer I spent years tracking DPRK activities and developments. People shouldn’t underestimate their technical capacities or ability to recruit smart hard working people.

jstarfish 3y ago
> People shouldn’t underestimate their technical capacities or ability to recruit smart hard working people. People hear about third-world living conditions and deprivation and say "aww, cute" as though it's sticks and rocks they're launching into the sea of Japan. They have money...it's all poured into the military. I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily.
- vkou 3y ago
  > I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily. And I don't understand why the media upplays them so heavily, as some kind of peer threat capable of meaningful force projection. (Well, I do understand it, someone needs to keep pounding the drum to keep this country on a forever-war footing.)
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    Feels like a weird post to make in the comments section of an article in which NK performed an active attack campaign...
    - vkou 3y ago
      Not weird when you consider what is, and what is not a proportionate mitigation of a threat. When someone gets mugged on your street, you can consider taking precautions. If your response is to roll out half a mile of barbed wire, electric fencing, and landmines all through the perimeter of your property, I would say that is absolutely 'upplaying' the actual level of threat. Most Americans' understanding of the actual threat posed to the US by NK is ludicrously upplayed. NK is a credible offensive threat to SK, but that's a very limited problem for anyone living in Nashville, Tennessee.
      - insanitybit 3y ago
        I mean, the response here was a blog post, which doesn't feel particularly upplayed. I also virtually never hear about NK from anyone or fear of NK from anyone day to day, nor do I hear about it particularly often from policy makers. No one is campaigning on fear of NK that I have seen. Perhaps TN is just a radically different world, I'd frankly believe it, but I haven't seen anything too significant at all. The last time people were really concerned about NK for like... 3 days, I think it was ~2012 or so.
        vkou 3y ago
        > I mean, the response here was a blog post, which doesn't feel particularly upplayed. I wasn't criticizing the blog post, I was responding to a comment in this thread that claimed that for some strange reason the danger of NK is systemically underplayed by the media. I argue that no, the media more typically overplays it, much like it overplays the threat from other non-peer nations. I'm assuming you don't feel like the news is telling you that Iran is a threat either... Which would put you in an informed minority.
        jryle70 3y ago
        Can you give an example of media overplaying NK?
        zirgs 3y ago
        NK seems to be getting disproportionate media attention compared to other dirt poor and authoritarian countries.
- verandaguy 3y ago
  >I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily. Because in the same way as morale can be a force multiplier, an extreme lack of it can be a force divider. Combine that with their (very likely) inability to sustain even a regional war for more than a few weeks, their antiquated equipment, and their largely unsuccessful domestic military developments, and it's not hard to write them off as largely a non-threat, whether or not this is truly the case. The major downside is that even if they only manage to sustain for a few weeks, that's plenty of time to level Seoul and inflict damage on cities further south should they decide to make a push against the ROK, and this is what shouldn't be downplayed.
  - bennyg 3y ago
    I’d bet they’re prepared to do a ton of damage to South Korea via cyberarms more than traditional weaponry too. Eg cut power to the country for days on end. They’ve clearly got 0days and aren’t afraid to use them.
    - hollerith 3y ago
      If 'cyberarms' are as potent as you think they are, then how come Russian cyberarms haven't done much damage to Ukraine?
      - NegativeK 3y ago
        Since 2014, nations with a strong vested interest in Ukraine not falling threw a lot of resources at strengthening the country's infosec. Also, during a kinetic conflict where you're invading, it's often more strategically valuable to lie dormant in their networks than it is to scorch them, a la America sitting inside of Iraq's phone networks and just listening. There's a lot of work being done now to change it [1], but I've heard from multiple cybersecurity grunts in critical infrastructure that they just assume foreign APTs are in their networks. Strategically, why in the world wouldn't they be? There's basically no downside other than burning TTPs. We should damn well expect the NSA to have their fingers in every foreign pot they can reach. [1] To be fair, there was a lot of work before too. But now people are more scared.
- avar 3y ago
  > third-world living conditions [...] I know that the phrase has gained an orthogonal meaning since the cold war, but if we use the original one it's funny to call what's arguably the only remaining second-world country "third-world".
  - snovymgodym 3y ago
    I mean if we're going by the original definitions, I think Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba are also still second-world though none of them are bizarrely neo-Stalinist the way North Korea is.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Are they really Stalinists? I would have guess Maoists, but then again, I wouldn't know the difference.
      - fein 3y ago
        North Korea is Juche.
      - BetaDeltaAlpha 3y ago
        North Korea was generally more aligned with the USSR than the PRC. Kim Il Sung and Mao were on the way up at the same time, and were both students of Lenin and Stalin.
- _jal 3y ago
  > I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily. There are a few reasons that interlock. - The DPRK government is a mob family with sovereign status and nukes. Most folks in western countries don't have a strong sense of what that means - looking through the lens of mostly free nations, it is hard to imagine the realities on the ground, and they fill in the blanks with what they know about bureaucratic states. - Lots of western folks, but USians in particular, are extremely ignorant and incurious about Asia and asian cultures. This amplifies the above problems and tends to lead to ridiculous ideas being believable. - DPRK's propaganda encourages some of this. Their interests are served when people in the west are thinking about their nukes and ignoring the hacking that pays for them. A side order of "we're so mean and crazy we starve our people" helps stoke the mad-man authoritarian archetype.
- omoikane 3y ago
  > why the media downplays them Perhaps you meant the media for some specific country, but news media in Japan do seem to take North Korea quite seriously, and missile launches frequently ends up being the first headline on NHK world news.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  They absolutely do not “have” money in a meaningful sense. They are very poor and the past few years have been much harder than decades past.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  > They have money And much more of it after crypto gained popularity. Darknet Diaries went through investigating some of their hacks. Amounts from one can be more than entire GDP of a small country. Some crypto is washed through Macanese etc banks but most is just used to pay for weapons and stuff directly.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
Put a gun to someone's head and you'll find that they're capable of just about anything.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  Even better, do it to their children, and literally everybody else who is important in their lives.
  - rm_-rf_slash 3y ago
    Probably more carrot than stick. NK hackers who can bring in millions to the state from crypto hacking, ransom etc likely live more comfortably than manual laborers.
    - spencerflem 3y ago
      Yeah, just look at what engineers here in the States are willing to do for money they don't really need
    - micromacrofoot 3y ago
      Both really. In NK the stick awaits all who stop chasing the carrot.
    - Georgelemental 3y ago
      Probably way less comfortably than if they could move to a civilized country though.
      - dralley 3y ago
        But they can't, so it's a moot point.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  Put a gun to someone's head, and they suddenly become less capable. A small amount of stress is good for productivity, but excessive stress destroys cognitive abilities.
BearhatBeer 3y ago
[flagged]
- Barrin92 3y ago
  those things aren't mutually exclusive. North Korea is a malnourished country, evidenced by the pretty stark fact that South Koreans are now so much taller that South Korean women are approaching the height of North Korean men. It's just that if you pump a quarter of your entire GDP into nukes and hackers you can still be decent at it even if your people are starving.
  - BearhatBeer 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - surge 3y ago
      Video evidence snuck out of the country frequently shows obviously malnourished people, even military soldiers, who are supposed to get special privileges and access to food look pale and show obvious signs of malnourishment. That said, they're a model for carbon footprint reduction.
    - rurp 3y ago
      It's not that hard to verify given the people who have risked their life to escape the country and spoken openly about the conditions there.
  - mach5 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > maybe the US should end the korean war Takes two, not just the UN side, to end the war.
    - dralley 3y ago
snthd 3y ago
>ability to recruit smart hard working people including non-nationals?
- chronogram 3y ago
  Of course. There are a lot more capable fish in the pond than the ones with the connections to a Western company, plus the capable fish in a Western pond but nobody talking to them because the onus is on the fish. You probably know people who are better programmers than people you work with who don't earn as much as people more socially savvy or placed, and who might want to also pay off a mortgage after 30 years.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
> technical capacities or ability to recruit smart hard working people Of course, there are different senses of "recruitment". The best recruits don't know they even have been.. The take-away here is that it's 99% social engineering and 1% a script-kiddy payload drop. Their SE play is based on our innate ability to be recruited, because we want to be. Because we spend our school and college days being conditioned to want to be valued, to feel needed, to look for validation and reward, to make beneficial connections and sell ourselves. Self commodification/reification is the beating heart of capitalism. They're smart to use that against us, by reaching out to security researchers, who (from personal experience) often feel isolated and/or undervalued. After all it's just "international collaboration" , right? Without due diligence in checking out new contacts (especially if they contact you to discuss things that they know interest you and then stroke the ego of your specialism) recruitment is easy. In the end you can't easily know whether that charismatic voice on the phone is really from your government, from Google, from a fellow researcher who wants to "share and collaborate"... and you probably wouldn't know what would constitute a credible proof of identity. Intelligence agencies could do well to spend a little money on benevolently watching out for commercial, civic, academic or hobbyist researchers who are valuable targets and sending a polite heads-up when the packets start arriving from N Korea.

jstarfish 3y ago

> People shouldn’t underestimate their technical capacities or ability to recruit smart hard working people. People hear about third-world living conditions and deprivation and say "aww, cute" as though it's sticks and rocks they're launching into the sea of Japan. They have money...it's all poured into the military. I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily.

vkou 3y ago
> I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily. And I don't understand why the media upplays them so heavily, as some kind of peer threat capable of meaningful force projection. (Well, I do understand it, someone needs to keep pounding the drum to keep this country on a forever-war footing.)
- insanitybit 3y ago
  Feels like a weird post to make in the comments section of an article in which NK performed an active attack campaign...
  - vkou 3y ago
    Not weird when you consider what is, and what is not a proportionate mitigation of a threat. When someone gets mugged on your street, you can consider taking precautions. If your response is to roll out half a mile of barbed wire, electric fencing, and landmines all through the perimeter of your property, I would say that is absolutely 'upplaying' the actual level of threat. Most Americans' understanding of the actual threat posed to the US by NK is ludicrously upplayed. NK is a credible offensive threat to SK, but that's a very limited problem for anyone living in Nashville, Tennessee.
    - insanitybit 3y ago
      I mean, the response here was a blog post, which doesn't feel particularly upplayed. I also virtually never hear about NK from anyone or fear of NK from anyone day to day, nor do I hear about it particularly often from policy makers. No one is campaigning on fear of NK that I have seen. Perhaps TN is just a radically different world, I'd frankly believe it, but I haven't seen anything too significant at all. The last time people were really concerned about NK for like... 3 days, I think it was ~2012 or so.
      - vkou 3y ago
        > I mean, the response here was a blog post, which doesn't feel particularly upplayed. I wasn't criticizing the blog post, I was responding to a comment in this thread that claimed that for some strange reason the danger of NK is systemically underplayed by the media. I argue that no, the media more typically overplays it, much like it overplays the threat from other non-peer nations. I'm assuming you don't feel like the news is telling you that Iran is a threat either... Which would put you in an informed minority.
        jryle70 3y ago
        Can you give an example of media overplaying NK?
        zirgs 3y ago
        NK seems to be getting disproportionate media attention compared to other dirt poor and authoritarian countries.
verandaguy 3y ago
>I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily. Because in the same way as morale can be a force multiplier, an extreme lack of it can be a force divider. Combine that with their (very likely) inability to sustain even a regional war for more than a few weeks, their antiquated equipment, and their largely unsuccessful domestic military developments, and it's not hard to write them off as largely a non-threat, whether or not this is truly the case. The major downside is that even if they only manage to sustain for a few weeks, that's plenty of time to level Seoul and inflict damage on cities further south should they decide to make a push against the ROK, and this is what shouldn't be downplayed.
- bennyg 3y ago
  I’d bet they’re prepared to do a ton of damage to South Korea via cyberarms more than traditional weaponry too. Eg cut power to the country for days on end. They’ve clearly got 0days and aren’t afraid to use them.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    If 'cyberarms' are as potent as you think they are, then how come Russian cyberarms haven't done much damage to Ukraine?
    - NegativeK 3y ago
      Since 2014, nations with a strong vested interest in Ukraine not falling threw a lot of resources at strengthening the country's infosec. Also, during a kinetic conflict where you're invading, it's often more strategically valuable to lie dormant in their networks than it is to scorch them, a la America sitting inside of Iraq's phone networks and just listening. There's a lot of work being done now to change it [1], but I've heard from multiple cybersecurity grunts in critical infrastructure that they just assume foreign APTs are in their networks. Strategically, why in the world wouldn't they be? There's basically no downside other than burning TTPs. We should damn well expect the NSA to have their fingers in every foreign pot they can reach. [1] To be fair, there was a lot of work before too. But now people are more scared.
avar 3y ago
> third-world living conditions [...] I know that the phrase has gained an orthogonal meaning since the cold war, but if we use the original one it's funny to call what's arguably the only remaining second-world country "third-world".
- snovymgodym 3y ago
  I mean if we're going by the original definitions, I think Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba are also still second-world though none of them are bizarrely neo-Stalinist the way North Korea is.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Are they really Stalinists? I would have guess Maoists, but then again, I wouldn't know the difference.
    - fein 3y ago
      North Korea is Juche.
    - BetaDeltaAlpha 3y ago
      North Korea was generally more aligned with the USSR than the PRC. Kim Il Sung and Mao were on the way up at the same time, and were both students of Lenin and Stalin.
_jal 3y ago
> I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily. There are a few reasons that interlock. - The DPRK government is a mob family with sovereign status and nukes. Most folks in western countries don't have a strong sense of what that means - looking through the lens of mostly free nations, it is hard to imagine the realities on the ground, and they fill in the blanks with what they know about bureaucratic states. - Lots of western folks, but USians in particular, are extremely ignorant and incurious about Asia and asian cultures. This amplifies the above problems and tends to lead to ridiculous ideas being believable. - DPRK's propaganda encourages some of this. Their interests are served when people in the west are thinking about their nukes and ignoring the hacking that pays for them. A side order of "we're so mean and crazy we starve our people" helps stoke the mad-man authoritarian archetype.
omoikane 3y ago
> why the media downplays them Perhaps you meant the media for some specific country, but news media in Japan do seem to take North Korea quite seriously, and missile launches frequently ends up being the first headline on NHK world news.
jncfhnb 3y ago
They absolutely do not “have” money in a meaningful sense. They are very poor and the past few years have been much harder than decades past.
throwaway290 3y ago
> They have money And much more of it after crypto gained popularity. Darknet Diaries went through investigating some of their hacks. Amounts from one can be more than entire GDP of a small country. Some crypto is washed through Macanese etc banks but most is just used to pay for weapons and stuff directly.

micromacrofoot 3y ago

Put a gun to someone's head and you'll find that they're capable of just about anything.

saiya-jin 3y ago
Even better, do it to their children, and literally everybody else who is important in their lives.
- rm_-rf_slash 3y ago
  Probably more carrot than stick. NK hackers who can bring in millions to the state from crypto hacking, ransom etc likely live more comfortably than manual laborers.
  - spencerflem 3y ago
    Yeah, just look at what engineers here in the States are willing to do for money they don't really need
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    Both really. In NK the stick awaits all who stop chasing the carrot.
  - Georgelemental 3y ago
    Probably way less comfortably than if they could move to a civilized country though.
    - dralley 3y ago
      But they can't, so it's a moot point.
jltsiren 3y ago
Put a gun to someone's head, and they suddenly become less capable. A small amount of stress is good for productivity, but excessive stress destroys cognitive abilities.

BearhatBeer 3y ago

[flagged]

Barrin92 3y ago
those things aren't mutually exclusive. North Korea is a malnourished country, evidenced by the pretty stark fact that South Koreans are now so much taller that South Korean women are approaching the height of North Korean men. It's just that if you pump a quarter of your entire GDP into nukes and hackers you can still be decent at it even if your people are starving.
- BearhatBeer 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - surge 3y ago
    Video evidence snuck out of the country frequently shows obviously malnourished people, even military soldiers, who are supposed to get special privileges and access to food look pale and show obvious signs of malnourishment. That said, they're a model for carbon footprint reduction.
  - rurp 3y ago
    It's not that hard to verify given the people who have risked their life to escape the country and spoken openly about the conditions there.
- mach5 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > maybe the US should end the korean war Takes two, not just the UN side, to end the war.
  - dralley 3y ago

snthd 3y ago

>ability to recruit smart hard working people including non-nationals?

chronogram 3y ago
Of course. There are a lot more capable fish in the pond than the ones with the connections to a Western company, plus the capable fish in a Western pond but nobody talking to them because the onus is on the fish. You probably know people who are better programmers than people you work with who don't earn as much as people more socially savvy or placed, and who might want to also pay off a mortgage after 30 years.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

> technical capacities or ability to recruit smart hard working people Of course, there are different senses of "recruitment". The best recruits don't know they even have been.. The take-away here is that it's 99% social engineering and 1% a script-kiddy payload drop. Their SE play is based on our innate ability to be recruited, because we want to be. Because we spend our school and college days being conditioned to want to be valued, to feel needed, to look for validation and reward, to make beneficial connections and sell ourselves. Self commodification/reification is the beating heart of capitalism. They're smart to use that against us, by reaching out to security researchers, who (from personal experience) often feel isolated and/or undervalued. After all it's just "international collaboration" , right? Without due diligence in checking out new contacts (especially if they contact you to discuss things that they know interest you and then stroke the ego of your specialism) recruitment is easy. In the end you can't easily know whether that charismatic voice on the phone is really from your government, from Google, from a fellow researcher who wants to "share and collaborate"... and you probably wouldn't know what would constitute a credible proof of identity. Intelligence agencies could do well to spend a little money on benevolently watching out for commercial, civic, academic or hobbyist researchers who are valuable targets and sending a polite heads-up when the packets start arriving from N Korea.