The Rise of North Korea's Hacking Army

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/26/the-incredible-rise-of-north-koreas-hacking-army

by mitchbob • 5 years ago

235 148 5 years ago

scottfits• 5 years ago

in 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• 5 years ago

I 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• 5 years ago

From 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.

frashelaw• 5 years ago

North 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-k...

https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-22/problem-north-korea-s...

hnbad4• 5 years ago

Regardless 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.

catgary2• 5 years ago

Your 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.

movedx2• 5 years 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.

phobosanomaly3• 5 years ago

They're patriotically serving their country doing an intellectually challenging job.

If you compare it to what many intelligent individuals wind up getting stuck doing in other developing countries it's a pretty awesome opportunity.

hnbad4• 5 years ago

Meanwhile these kids are getting conscripted into being crooks.
I really can’t imagine how bitter that would make me feel.

That's how I feel about smart CS kids getting duped into working for the CIA or NSA, but I have less sympathy with those because they're coerced with cozy paychecks rather than the implied threat of literally being dragged in at gunpoint.

filomeno• 5 years 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?

FredPret2• 5 years ago

Products and services are far more questionable than hacking and theft?

wongarsu• 5 years 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.

andrewzah2• 5 years ago

It's only bad when we don't like that country, I suppose.

codezero13• 5 years ago

At 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• 5 years ago

Don't you think it's just people can set their country to North Korea just for fun?

codezero13• 5 years ago

I am confident these were legit.

zerkten• 5 years ago

I can't imagine they have a very strong compliance focus. What gave them away in particular, or where they just operating in the open?

codezero13• 5 years ago

Wide open.

masijo• 5 years ago

Why wouldn't they allow it, though?

codezero13• 5 years ago

US businesses cannot offer services to several countries we have sanctions against.

xxpor• 5 years ago

Sanctions

boomboomsubban11• 5 years ago

Anybody on HackerRank could use the knowledge gained nefariously, why should North Koreans be specifically banned?

codezero13• 5 years ago

I don’t think they should be. Those people are pawns though, not curious hackers. The Us govt decides what countries we sanction, not me.

creato• 5 years ago

In my opinion: as long as NK blocks its average citizens from using the internet, we should block the "privileged" in NK from using the internet.

m00x3• 5 years ago

Hacker rank is an American company. US has sanctions against NK and they treat this very seriously. They could shut down hacker rank for not complying.

m00x3• 5 years ago

You can set your country to anything. I changed mine to North Korean and I'm Canadian. This doesn't prove anything other than people like to meme.

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/ppiy0

Guereric• 5 years ago

On every thread with a paywalled site, I appreciate the kindness you show by linking an archive copy.

mensetmanusman• 5 years ago

This is my favorite black swan event for Coinbase: NK decides to infiltrate and steal all the BTC.

eloff• 5 years ago

Surely 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• 5 years ago

Can'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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rZkdPXP6H4

dillondoyle• 5 years ago

and insured?

optimalsolver• 5 years ago

The pressing question is how do we rescue Tea Girl from North Korea?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF2gswLeuPQ

keithnz• 5 years ago

I 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• 5 years ago

You're gonna be shocked when you find out McCarthy was actually right about a bunch of infiltrators...

lostlogin• 5 years ago

If they are on here, is that the communists infiltrating the capitalists or the capitalists infiltrating the communists?

eplanit• 5 years ago

It'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• 5 years ago

Maybe but it will be like Stephen Hawking hosting a party for time travelers.

jasonhansel• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Ah yes, the hacker's secret cryptographical weapon!

(It certainly reads that way)

sn41• 5 years ago

Must be an advanced hacker tool if it shows in "margins". My hex dump shows it only in one margin. /s

wahern• 5 years ago

The 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.

MaximumYComb• 5 years ago

Interestingly, malware often hides these strings with different types of obfuscation.

anthk• 5 years ago

Having that "security joke" enforced by the South called "ActiveX", North Korea had it really easy to collapse SK down a la Blaster/Sasser way.

Veserv3• 5 years ago

Well 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...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GSEchbDuB8

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2015_Ukraine_power_gr...

[4] https://www.geappliances.com/ge/connected-appliances/ranges-...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2JPLMzQjkk

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX9-puUjoDU

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7#UMBRAGE

ackbar03• 5 years ago

Where can I purchase this? you have an ebay or amazon link or something?

Der_Einzige• 5 years ago

Like, in principle you're right. In practice, cyber attacks at the level of terror that is equivilent to a "full scale nuclear first strike" simply have not happened (yet).

I do believe that you might be making a bit of hyperbole with the scale of possible terror potentially possible for such small amounts of money. Some crazy mofo should have done this by now. You're telling me that ted kaczynski types don't exist for hacking?

shostack• 5 years ago

Read up on NotPetya.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petya_(malware)

Veserv3• 5 years ago

No, the reasoning that it is easy enough for some crazy person to do so, but none have done so yet, therefore it is unlikely to be possible is deeply flawed. On 2001/09/11 hijackers flew Boeing 767s into buildings for the first time in history and killed thousands. Yet, Boeing 767s had been flying for 19 years by that point and there were planes equally good for such a task for 40-50 years. On 2016/07/14 in Nice a person drove a truck into a promenade killing 86 people. Yet, cargo trucks had been in operation for 100? years by that point. These ideas are obvious, easily achievable, available for decades, and require no particularly advanced knowledge or skills to plan, yet took literal decades to occur after the point at which they became feasible.

The capability to engage in a large scale cyber-physical attack is maybe 10-15 years old. Not even a generation has passed since it became technologically feasible. To put that into perspective, Ted Kaczynski started his attacks when he was 36. If at the very moment that it became possible an 18 year old "crazy mofo" also figured that out they would still not be as old as Ted Kaczynski was when he started.

lumost2• 5 years ago

At these prices, cyber attacks are much cheaper than cruise missiles but too expensive for most criminals/terrorists without an explicit objective.

You'd expect state actors to use these attacks to achieve a particular goal, where the cyber attack option is weighed against the cruise missile option. Permanently destroying a power grid doesn't make a ton of sense for any reasonable objective other than total war.

PradeetPatel• 5 years ago

That's some seriously scary (and concerning) stuff. As a non technical person, what are some things I can do to protect my company against complex cyber adversaries?

Also, considering the destructive potential of those cyber weapons, are there any international laws surrounding the usage of them against civilian targets?

ChuckNorris89• 5 years ago

what are some things I can do to protect my company against complex cyber adversaries?

Employ on site Red and Blue teams or pay externals for regular penetration tests and security audits that feed back results to your site/infra/dev-ops teams.

None of this is new but most businesses ignore them since it's seen as an expensive snake oil and most importantly, "it's never gonna happen to me".

Abishek_Muthian• 5 years ago

As a non technical person, what are some things I can do to protect my company against complex cyber adversaries?

That usually comes down to - who are your adversaries? Parent implies that given enough money, high value targets can be compromised for less money than conventional military arsenal.

For an average individual, small company dealing with non-sensitive data - preventing non-targeted attacks is likely high priority e.g. Preventing your applications, data from getting compromised because its vulnerability was detected in the random scan of the attacker (or) your staff plugged in a flash drive with ransomware.

Some simple non-exhaustive preventive measures are - Operational Security(Training staffs to not click unwanted links, social engineering attacks(not to reveal too much about their work online, Better identity management etc.) Application Security(Ensuring security focused application development, keeping up-to date with the patches for libraries etc.), Collecting less customer data as possible(Ensuring customer privacy).

wepple• 5 years ago

What’s your budget & what are you protecting?

Without that info, I think one of the only universal recommendations (whether you’re a trillion dollar FAANG or 2 person startup) is buy U2F keys for everyone* and enable them everywhere. Also try to know what assets you have, and patch everything regularly.

* yubico make great U2F keys which I recommend. Others such as google also make keys

devit• 5 years ago

Don't connect anything critical to any network, directly or indirectly, except a dedicated one separate from the Internet if unavoidable.

Never browse the web, read e-mail or otherwise run any Internet client from any machine with data on it and instead use a separate machine or if unavoidable a VM on top of a reasonably secure hypervisor to run the browser.

Secure every single systems assuming that the network is compromised.

Restrict access data to only those who need it.

Avoid software written in C/C++ for anything security critical at all costs unless there is no alternative.

Only hire competent programmers and sysadmins.

Invest in proper physical security.

yabones• 5 years ago

Defence in depth. It's not a buzzword anymore, but the principals hold up.

Basically, each component in your threat model should have no less than two controls to protect it. Assume that 'active' systems (antivirus etc) can and will fail. Passive measures are predictable and cost effective, but have limitations - a mixture of both is ideal.

Think of it like a well fortified house. You don't just stick a robotic machine gun on the roof and command it to shoot people it doesn't recognize - everybody knows from intuition that's a bad idea. Instead, you layer up your defences. Passive measures are a great start: a steel door, bars in the windows, bollards to keep vehicles away, etc. Then you layer active measures: lights and cameras, sensors in windows and doors, keycard access to different areas, etc. Anything more than that you need to develop your threat model; are you defending against bears or against a helicopter gunship? A moat won't protect you from a chopper, and radar guided anti-aircraft missiles won't be very effective against bears.

Veserv3• 5 years ago

About the only commercially available solution that provides defense against attackers with more than $1-10M is a system that is inaccessible to a remote attacker. As a company this means complete physical disconnection of the systems you want to use in addition to a complete removal of all possible connectors except for a very limited set of explicitly enumerated entry points that you add back onto a system that is completely physically disconnected.

To evaluate the quality of your security, you should hire a red team, a team that emulates an attacker, to attempt to breach your security. If they are able to breach your systems then the key takeaway is that your security process is systemically incapable of defending against attackers with that level of budget and resources which is supported by the empirical evidence that a team with that level of budget and resources did, in fact, breach your systems. This is in contrast to the standard takeaway which is to just fix the specific defects discovered since obviously the only defects that exist are specifically in the areas that were probed. To actually remediate the problem you need a systemic overhaul otherwise you will just keep getting the same quality of output that is equally defective.

Unfortunately, the prevailing state of cybersecurity has no functional solutions to these problems once you get to attackers with a few million dollars outside of the heavy-handed and highly inconvenient solution of disconnection. For systems with safety standards, that is a cost that should be paid. For any other system, you need to evaluate if disconnection is worth it in the context that there is a 100% chance that anybody with a few million dollars can successfully completely compromise your systems. If you only consider direct harms such as monetary damages, disruption of business, stock price changes, it is highly unlikely to be worth it compared to getting insurance at this time as most attacks that do direct harm are still being done by financially unsophisticated attackers who are still underutilizing their blackmail potential by at least 10-100x, so it is almost always financially prudent to just eat the cost. As for indirect effects, it is up to you to consider if IP loss, reputation loss, leakage of confidential information, etc. at the cost of a few million dollars is worse than the negative effects of disconnecting.

dikei• 5 years ago

Fortunately, countries with "nuclear first strike" do not perform them liberally, due to the threat of mutual destruction.

Hopefully, the same thing also applies to cyberspace.

baybal22• 5 years ago

I don't think there is much to "cyber-destroy" in retaliation even with a country like China.

On other hand, you have much more countries constantly exerting overt aggression despite retaliation by Western countries being quite possible... but never coming for all reasons from co-opted politicians, and insiders, to power of their public image, to plain cowardice.

hooande• 5 years ago

Every one of these potential attacks would require a lot of things to go very right. It's easy to do X or Y under experimental conditions. The real world is far more chaotic and the odds of success are lower.

Further, none of these things would cause an enemy to capitulate. If an enemy shut off power or caused car crashes in several major cities at once, the US isn't going to just surrender or even think about it. They're going to strike back with the widest array of options for employing force that earth has ever seen. Every option you listed would be pin pricking a giant.

Cyber warfare is super cheap, but it's also orders of magnitude less effective than sustained aerial bombardment or a complete naval blockade. Another tool in the tool chest, but not something I would base my national defense on

x86_64Ubuntu2• 5 years ago

The difference is that the US homeland isn't used to feeling repercussions for it's foreign policy and aggression abroad. The US populace most certainly isn't hardy enough to suffer through extended power, water and connectivity outages because of diplomatic failures. It's not about forcing a surrender, but more about making hostilities and aggression unpalatable to the citizenry.

miohtama• 5 years ago

Note that all of these attacks are easily defendable and closable, unlike closing a border for attacking tanks. The only reason the attack vectors exist is the legacy of Microsoft Windows and not having competent enough embedded system programmers. Risks have been externalized in the name of short term shareholders profit. The only way to fix the situation is to have investors to suffer if their company inadequately deals with cyber security.

tester34• 5 years ago

Windows or 150 other apps that run on Windows?

kungito• 5 years ago

I'm not sure where you are pulling these numbers from but my napkin math would go way differently. 1st question is how much does a security professional cost who is willing to do illegal stuff and knows how to do it properly. I'd say the number is around 300-500k$ a year. How many of these do you need? How do you find them? You need to pay quite a lot to someone with knowledge about how to find these people. How do you know your professionals will manage to find anything? You could waste millions this way and still come up with noting. In reality you are not the one who would be organizing this. You need to find someone who usually does this and pay him 3-10x the cost he has for running this. And you need to pay the guy who helped you find this guy. So I guess you end up at around 10-50mil$ to fund an operation like this with questionable outcome, together with the risk of exposing yourself or ending up in some undercover police plot and end up in jail. And whats the worst you can realistically do? Get private info about people which gets leaked all the time or turn smart lights on and off for many people at the same time?

FredPret2• 5 years ago

Yes but think about a nation-state. They aren't looking to hire black-hat hackers and dodge the police, they're creating a military division that recruits and trains the hackers, and they are their own police. They'll be able to manage their talent flow to ensure they can execute operations properly.

With regards to potential impact, I'm afraid it's a little more serious than smart lights changing colour. One could disable power-plants, steal money, vandalize factories. I saw a DefCon talk where the guy stumbled onto a totally open control panel for a waste-water treatment plant.

With a little creativity and co-ordination, this can be a very effective form of war. See also the Israeli's (or someone) disrupting Iran's nuclear ambitions.

spixy• 5 years ago

For US citizen it may be 300-500k, but for people from some other country 50k could be enough.

JTbane• 5 years ago

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.

If it were that easy, why hasn't a hack happened with a massive loss of life yet? Most big breaches involve credit card numbers or other personal info.

decafninja• 5 years ago

I'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.

jhwang5• 5 years ago

It'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

phobosanomaly3• 5 years ago

Sounds plausible, but is there any sort of evidence or indication that this is happening?

maxden• 5 years ago

There was the timber hauling truck converted into an ICBM launcher. With the deforestation apparently happening in North Korea it probably wasn't the best thing to sell them regardless.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-china...

hnbad4• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what your point is. I can see you make two diametrically opposed arguments with that example:

A) Even seemingly harmless tools can be turned into dangerous weapons and they've done so before, so the best course of action is to not support them at all because they'll just turn around and try to hurt us.

B) Even seemingly harmless tools can be turned into dangerous weapons so there's no point in obsessing whether what we give them could be used for nefarious purposes as they'll just come up with a way to hurt us if they want to anyway.

yongjik3• 5 years ago

I understand your point, but the fear sounds overblown. North Korea isn't some isolated kingdom in the Andes - they have a long border with China, over which the US has no control.

If NK wants to raise a hacker army, I don't think the existence of some used computers donated by American churches would make a meaningful difference.

* That said, we also have to consider the danger of the US government deciding the donation is illegal, so ... (shrug)

ehsankia• 5 years ago

My knowledge of NK is fairly limited, but I genuinely don't see what help would computers do to NK. Do they have access to the internet? What good do computers do without an internet connection? Maybe you can play some games, maybe you can load some software like spreadsheets but that's assuming they have books to learn how to use it. Would it be for training so they can get some better jobs? Are there computer jobs?

SuoDuanDao• 5 years ago

In addition to the host country's potential concerns, donated computers often contain private data that the donator thinks has been deleted. If a country is known to have a hacker program, I certainly wouldn't want my computer going there even if they can buy factory grade ones.

bane• 5 years ago

There's a major IT/Business school in Pyongyang largely staffed and administered by U.S. based missionaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyongyang_University_of_Scienc...

ZoomerCretin• 5 years ago

This 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.

dheera2• 5 years ago

Not only that, but this breeds hate towards the US as well.

Because in the eyes of a poor individual civilian who had food to eat yesterday and didn't today due to some stupid embargo, the US is responsible for their hunger.

fastball2• 5 years ago

That's gonna be true regardless of what happens, the NK regime isn't exactly going easy on the propaganda.

dang• 5 years ago

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. It's tedious, repetitive, inevitably turns nasty (see below) and does nothing to help.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26910229.

evanphamilton• 5 years ago

Some 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• 5 years ago

I'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-undergroun...

rmac• 5 years ago

This article missed the recent social engineering attack dprk carried out against cyber security researchers: https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/prominent-cybersecurity-r...

Their social engineering skills are impressive!

The Rise of North Korea's Hacking Army

Related Stories