
How North Korean hackers became the world’s greatest bank robbers - aaronbrethorst
https://gpinvestigations.pri.org/how-north-korean-hackers-became-the-worlds-greatest-bank-robbers-492a323732a6
======
mittermayr
It always amazes me how they get their 'digital soldiers' to such a level of
expertise. I've spent my entire life in front of a computer, in absolute
perfect conditions (internet, education, smart friends) and did everything and
anything, from writing assembly code for microchips to deploying self-scaling
Amazon SaaS-products, from learning to write cracks for Windows apps to
studying anything from Max Headroom to the Morris worm -- and yet, here I am,
absolutely incapable of reliably securing a god-damn Wordpress site.

I was always under the impression that there isn't much of an alternative when
looking for highly-qualified tech-people, other than trying to find those who
'walked the walk', who've spent a giant junk of their life in front of the
keyboard, hacking away. I can't, for the life of me, imagine how kids in North
Korea are able to spend anywhere near the time required to become a state-
level hacker. Where does all this information come from? Who breaks this into
junks, who teaches them or provides the level of pre-processing required to
ramp up that quickly? It can't be Youtube videos, can it? I know they mention
a university, but the general reporting on North Korea has blurred my
imagination enough to still imagine them as poor farmers and 70s-military-
style troopers. It's puzzling.

~~~
rasz
Have you ever been hungry? in your entire life? and I dont mean for fun/diet.
Information is not a problem(study published exploits etc), all you need is
proper motivation.

~~~
sametmax
You can't hack 10 hours a day for 10 years while being hungry, afraid and
without passion.

Hacking is not just learning information, it's nuturring a certain mindset,
including creativity.

Besides, they only have a few people with internet, so i can't see the
infrastructure they use either.

I really put my money on hired guns here.

------
projektfu
This is quite a lot of speculation. Why steal dollars when you've been
printing them? They show a photo of students at an elite school to make you
think you're looking at a hacker boiler room. It's difficult to trust anything
the PRK government says, but almost all external reporting is also incredibly
suspect. I file these sorts of articles under "entertainment".

~~~
sho_hn
I attended a symposium on North Korea's cyberattacks and organized cybercrime
in Seoul a few months ago. One of the guest speakers was a Bangladeshi
economics professor, heavily networked into the country's financial
institutions, talking about the banking system hack. I had dinner with him and
the organizers later that night. They're pretty serious about it all.

I didn't read the linked article.

------
wpdev_63
Yeah, umm... "North Korean" hackers....

------
vuluvu
"That’s what the thieves went after in February 2016: nearly $1 billion,
sitting in a Fed-run account"

Has the Fed ever given consideration to not connecting their banking computer
directly to the Internet?

