[ExI] Why Hackers Aren’t Afraid of Us

[SR Ballard]

OF COURSE hackers don't take the US seriously? Why should they? The US
government takes no efforts (as far as I can tell) to encourage, recruit,
and train good talent the way NK does.

North Korean children are assessed early in their education for Math
proficiencies and funneled into computer educations.

The North Korean defector familiar with the country’s cyber training says
> he received such training, and describes intense preparation for annual
> “hackathon” competitions in Pyongyang, in which teams of students holed up
> learning to solve puzzles and hacking problems under severe time pressure.
>


> “For six months, day and night, we prepared only for this contest,” he
> says. He recalls going home for a meal after an all-night prep session only
> to wake up with his head resting in his bowl of soup. “It was everyone’s
> dream to be a part of it.”


Some trainees are sent overseas to master foreign languages or to
> participate in international hackathons in places such as India or China,
> where they compete against coders from around the world. At a 2015 global
> competition called CodeChef, run by an Indian software company, *North
> Korean teams ranked first, second and third out of more than 7,600
> world-wide*. Three of the top 15 coders in CodeChef’s network of about
> 100,000 participants are North Korean.


Since hackers are treated well by the Government, I'm sure that parents
encourage their children to apply themselves to their studies.

Defectors and South Korea cyber experts say hacker trainees recruited by
> North Korea’s government get roomy Pyongyang apartments and exemptions from
> mandatory military service.


There are also numerous other benefits and incouragements that North
Koreans receive.


North Koreans have also been taking the internet seriously far longer than
the United States.

North Korea’s hacking program dates at least to *the mid-1990s*, when
> then-leader Kim Jong Il said that “all wars in future years will be
> computer wars.”


According to "The Good American" a documentary which I recently watched, it
seems the NSA wasn't even fully digital until after 9/11. They were still
relying on old analog methods.


While its earlier attacks used well-known tools and familiar coding,
> Pyongyang tried to learn from better hackers abroad, says Simon Choi,
> a cybersecurity consultant to South Korea’s government who tracks online
> behavior. North Korean-linked accounts on Facebook and Twitter began
> following famous Chinese hackers and marked “like” on pages of how-to books
> outlining how to make malicious code for mobile devices, he says. Some
> North Koreans registered for online courses offered in South Korea teaching
> people how to hack smartphones, he says.



> McAfee said it took suspected North Korean cyberwarriors *just seven days
> in December to discover and use Invoke-PSImag*e, a new
> open-source hacking tool, to target groups involved in the Winter Olympics.
> McAfee said hackers used the tool to custom-build a malware download that
> was invisible to most antivirus software and hid malicious files in an
> image attached to a Word document.



Quotes from WSJ article, "How North Korea's Hackers became dangerously
good"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-north-koreas-hackers-became-dangerously-good-1524150416



On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 3:10 AM, John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> "Yet in this arms race, the United States has often been its own worst
> enemy. Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its
> highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of
the
> electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot
> right back at us. That’s what happened with the WannaCry ransomware attack
> by North Korea last year, which used some of the sophisticated tools the
> N.S.A. had developed. No wonder the agency has refused to admit that the
> weapons were made in America: It raised the game of its attackers. "
>
> "Nuclear weapons are still the ultimate currency of national power, as the
> meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore last week
> showed. But they cannot be used without causing the end of human
> civilization — or at least of a regime. So it’s no surprise that hackers
> working for North Korea, Iran’s mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and
the
> People’s Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great
advantage
> of cyberweapons is that they are the opposite of a nuke: hard to detect,
> easy to deny and increasingly finely targeted. And therefore,
> extraordinarily hard to deter. "
>
>
>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/sunday-review/why-hackers-arent-afraid-of-us.html
>
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