

Has North Korea Started the First Cyber War? - ccarpenterg
http://mashable.com/2009/07/08/north-korea-cyber-war/

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korussian
I live here in South Korea next door to the DMZ. If this is a cyber war, it
hasn't been very disruptive yet. I'm having no trouble accessing any of the
standard Korean websites that were/are said to be under attack (Naver, KEB).
My $35/month internet access package is today what it was last week - the
fastest unlimited internet in the world.

What I can say is that we need to make it much more difficult to infect
personal computers here.

If you show me a Korean government or non-trivial Korean corporate website,
I'll show you a website that uses at least 3 activeX controls and is optimized
for IE6. Most public computers and the majority of personal computers I've
used here have been running IE6 or 7. I'll admit that in Seoul and larger
cities like Pusan, Ilsan, and Gwangju, you'll sometimes catch people using
Macbooks at Starbucks. Score one for security via obscurity, but non-IE folks
can't use ANY banking website or government site (National Tax Service,
National Pension, National Health, etc).

Even though I'm in the "most wired country in the world", the majority of high
schoolers, uni students, and business people I've interacted with aren't more
tech-savvy than your average grandma. Everyone runs the dubious AhnLab Anti-
virus as a mandatory magical medallion that came with the computer.

We need to do better - Korea's great ability is overnight change on a massive
scale. The day President Lee announces that all browsers should be upgraded to
the latest version is the day that all browsers will be upgraded to the latest
version. Seriously.

Barring that kind of concerted effort, should the day come when I see a non-IE
browser or something other than WinXP/Vista on a Korean adult's primary/only
computer, I will eat this hat. This one, right here.

~~~
khafra
Five years ago, when I lived in South Korea next door to the DMZ, I got the
fastest unlimited internet in the world for $35 a month, but all the computers
I saw ran Windows 98. Now, they still use IE6? Do you think that years-long
lag behind the state of the art can be permanently overcome, or just
temporarily bypassed?

~~~
korussian
The average Korean's internet usage seems to be stuck in something of a walled
garden - Naver/Daum/CyWorld/"Cafes"... and that's pretty much it. Most folks
around here like the comfort of treading in groups, always where others have
trod before. I don't think that is likely to change any time soon, probably
about the same time travel agents start to see a decline in package tours in
favor of individual trips. In other words: probably never.

On the other hand, Koreans are never behind the state of the art - they do
relish having the latest and greatest things to show off. You can count on one
hand the number of second-hand stores in Seoul, mostly because new=good.

They simply have no problem conforming to the flock, which, in the case of
internet security, is rarely a smart move. When eventually some high-level
government official or TV channel will point this out, suddenly everyone will
take notice, and they'll all move on, as a flock, to the next thing, and the
next, and next.

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rms
I doubt it's North Korea. A DPRK officially sanctioned forum of overseas DPRK
supporters thinks the accusations are laughable. [http://www.korea-
dpr.com/cgi-bin/simpleforum.cgi?fid=04&...](http://www.korea-dpr.com/cgi-
bin/simpleforum.cgi?fid=04&topic_id=1247083849)

That forum is fun to click around, btw. Only members are allowed to post and
only points of view that agree with the official DPRK line are allowed.
Contrast with this: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/12...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/12/10/AR2008121003855.html)

~~~
rms
I've thought of becoming a member of the Korea Friends association so I could
post there and slowly build up a trusted account to start subtly questioning
things, but that don't want to get myself on a list of supporters of known
terrorist states.

------
emilis_info
I understand that North Korean government has a motive, but do they have
enough technological ability to orchestrate such an attack? A country full of
starving people and with one website opened a few years ago? I highly doubt
it.

On the other hand I doubt any of the other few possible states (China or
Russia) would turn to such demonstration of force against US unless they had
something to gain from it.

What's left then? Some crazy group like 4chan or some errorists? They would be
shouting "we did it" before you even heard the news about the attacks.

Oh well... back to square two.

~~~
sp332
It doesn't take talent to rent a botnet.

------
nir
Botnets are not a new invention. They are being rented for DDoS attacks for a
while now. "Cyber Wars" aren't new either:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare#Known_attacks> or:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-
service_attack#Incide...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-
service_attack#Incidents)

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forinti
I thought they were a backwards agricultural communist country with no
electricity and now they launch cyberwar? Maybe their media is not the only
biased one.

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balding_n_tired
Right. The guys who haven't mastered 65-year-old fission technology.

------
I_got_fifty
Can't you just drop all packages from NK?

------
onreact-com
North Korea? Cyber war? This is crap. People in North Korea starve! They have
no cars, not even shampoo. They have no resources or man power to start
anything "cyber".

~~~
FooBarWidget
Journalists love to use the term, but what _is_ a "cyber war" anyway? The
first thing I think about is a bunch of script kiddies trying to take over
each other's IRC channels with netsplits and operator status, and trying to
erase each other's hard drives with Sub7.

~~~
roc
Well, a cyber-strike would be a coordinated digital attack meant to achieve a
strategic goal by force. So a cyber war, by extension, would be a prolonged
exchange of such strikes.

So this could plausibly be one such strike in an on-going conflict that is far
more 'real' than script kiddie squabbling.

Could have been a penetration attack to steal technological secrets.

Could have been a penetration to plant backdoors/loggers for later use.

Could be service disruptions to hamper a particular project. (Take down the
network serving No Fly List sorts of updates to get a possibly-compromised
agent on a plane or over a border.)

Could just be a 'recon' attack to see what we have connected and how we react.
A sort of digital equivalent to the kinds of 'disruption' that we financed and
supported from Okinawa toward China for many years.

But I personally find it hard to believe that any state-sponsored cyber
'strike' would be limited to a DDoS on public-facing services. That sounds
like a smokescreen at best.

