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Prof. Kim Heung-Kwang has told BBC Click that North Korea has trained 6,000 military hackers capable of attacks that could destroy critical infrastructure or even kill people:
For 20 years Prof Kim taught computer science at Hamheung Computer Technology University, before escaping the country in 2004. While Prof Kim did not teach hacking techniques, his former students have gone on to form North Korea's notorious hacking unit Bureau 121. The bureau, which is widely believed to operate out of China, has been credited for numerous hacks. Many of the attacks are said to have been aimed specifically at South Korean infrastructure, such as power plants and banks.
Speaking at a location just outside the South Korean capital, Prof Kim told the BBC he has regular contact with key figures within the country who have intimate knowledge of the military's cyber operation. "The size of the cyber-attack agency has increased significantly, and now has approximately 6,000 people," he said. He estimated that between 10% to 20% of the regime's military budget is being spent on online operations. "The reason North Korea has been harassing other countries is to demonstrate that North Korea has cyber war capacity," he added. "Their cyber-attacks could have similar impacts as military attacks, killing people and destroying cities."
Speaking more specifically, Prof Kim said North Korea was building its own malware based on Stuxnet - a hack attack, widely attributed to the US and Israel, which struck Iranian nuclear centrifuges before being discovered in 2010. "[A Stuxnet-style attack] designed to destroy a city has been prepared by North Korea and is a feasible threat," Prof Kim said. Earlier this year, the South Korean government blamed North Korea for a hack on the country's Hydro and Nuclear Power Plant. "Although the nuclear plant was not compromised by the attack, if the computer system controlling the nuclear reactor was compromised, the consequences could be unimaginably severe and cause extensive casualties," Prof Kim said.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:42PM
Don't forget simple economic damage. Say for the sake of example, some N.K. agent bricks every NEST thermostat ever made. Not a very big deal on the world stage, but to NEST the company I'm sure that's very exciting.
Software companies are used to this kind of stuff. It'll be interesting to watch fridge, thermostat, garbage disposal, and lightbulb companies when their products get bricked. And cars, and electric can openers, and electric shavers, and ...
The real fun isn't in bricking entire finished machines but "behind the scenes" stuff. Like every GM alternator made in the past 30 years simultaneously and remotely gets disabled. Or every gigabit ethernet fiber optic transceiver, simultaneously. The rest of the car or router or whatever would be unaffected, but...
As for the N.K. motivation, aside from the US addiction to killing wedding parties with drone strikes along with random women and children, these economic hits could be a source of hard currency or influence. Why just have your CEO submit a statement to the UN condemning "whatever" and we'll keep the smoke-alarm-goes-off-continuously exploit under wraps, etc.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:07PM
> Software companies are used to this kind of stuff. It'll be interesting to watch fridge, thermostat, garbage disposal, and lightbulb companies when their products get bricked.
Forget the sellers. Watch the users. Will they tolerate fragile crap, like they do with software?
If so, it won't be long until some CFO says oh dear, we're short our sales goal this quarter, send out the command to make 3 million people buy replacements.
People are used to software that fails routinely, because that's how it has been since the dawn of the GUI. Most people don't write code, so they don't know that bad code is the fruit of sloppiness or haste. If this starts happening with "real stuff", where they're used to things that last awhile, I hope they roast the first manufacturer who tries it.