In North Korea, Hackers Are a Handpicked, Pampered Elite 102
HughPickens.com writes: Ju-Min Park and James Pearson report at Reuters that despite its poverty and isolation, North Korea has poured resources into a sophisticated cyber-warfare cell called Bureau 121, staffed by some of the most talented, and rewarded, people in North Korea, handpicked and trained from as young as 17. "They are handpicked," says Kim Heung-kwang, a former computer science professor in North Korea who defected to the South in 2004. "It is a great honor for them. It is a white-collar job there and people have fantasies about it." The hackers in Bureau 121 were among the 100 students who graduate from the University of Automation each year after five years of study. Over 2,500 apply for places at the university, which has a campus in Pyongyang, behind barbed wire.
According to Jang Se-yul, who studied with them at North Korea's military college for computer science, the Bureau 121 unit comprises about 1,800 cyber-warriors, and is considered the elite of the military. As well as having salaries far above the country's average, they are often gifted with good food, luxuries and even apartments. According to John Griasafi, this kind of treatment could be expected for those working in the elite Bureau. "You'd have to be pretty special and well trusted to even be allowed on email in North Korea so I have no doubt that they are treated well too." Pyongyang has active cyber-warfare capabilities, military and software security experts have said. In 2013, tens of thousands of computers were made to malfunction, disrupting work at banks and television broadcasters in South Korea. "In North Korea, it's called the Secret War," says Jang.
According to Jang Se-yul, who studied with them at North Korea's military college for computer science, the Bureau 121 unit comprises about 1,800 cyber-warriors, and is considered the elite of the military. As well as having salaries far above the country's average, they are often gifted with good food, luxuries and even apartments. According to John Griasafi, this kind of treatment could be expected for those working in the elite Bureau. "You'd have to be pretty special and well trusted to even be allowed on email in North Korea so I have no doubt that they are treated well too." Pyongyang has active cyber-warfare capabilities, military and software security experts have said. In 2013, tens of thousands of computers were made to malfunction, disrupting work at banks and television broadcasters in South Korea. "In North Korea, it's called the Secret War," says Jang.
Hackers Are Pampered (Score:4, Insightful)
>> In North Korea, Hackers Are a Handpicked, Pampered Elite
Which means $3K/year, 1600 calories a day?
Re: Hackers Are Pampered (Score:1)
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1600 calories is close to starvation whether or not other people are chomping 3500 or getting 1000.
Relative schmelative.
Researchers! (Score:2)
They are called Reseachers dammit!
Re:Hackers Are Pampered (Score:5, Informative)
>> In North Korea, Hackers Are a Handpicked, Pampered Elite
Which means $3K/year, 1600 calories a day?
Actually, the majority of the food aid sent to North Korea by aid agencies gets redirected and distributed to its military. Given that these are military positions, that's what they'll be eating. Nice eh?
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No. The only way to remember that is to read Fox.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2... [foxnews.com]
And even they make pretty clear it was baseless speculation.
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It was a stupid idea, anyway. You don't breed (relatively) large animals to feed a starving population since the food they'd consume to grow large would be much more efficiently distributed directly to the starving people.
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'cept rabbits can eat stuff you can't. Straw for example.
Similar to why some areas in the world really do have to raise cattle or goats. There's nothing else that will grow there a human can eat. (then there's http://www.ted.com/talks/allan... [ted.com])
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True, but only relevant to North Korea if "free" straw is plentiful. Though really, it's hay that rabbits need to thrive. Straw is basically the leftover shafts of harvested grains, which doesn't have near the nutrients of hay.
To get lots of straw you'd need lots of grain crops, anyway, so they'd have lots of food. And to get what you you really need, hay, you need to harvest the crops before they seed, so you are basically giving it to the rabbits instead of the people.
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I was using straw in a general sense hoping people would abstract â
Ok. Let's say any high cellulose greenery of which the natural world is full.
Last I checked, North Korea is not, in fact nothing but bare rock.
Things rabbits can eat that humans will extract little to no nutrients from:
twigs/bark
grass
leaves
thistles/weeds
Here's the thing.
North Korea actually should be able to feed itself. It is profoundly disfunctional due to its political system and therefore, well, full of wild stuff.
Rabbits can eat t
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I agree that there could be some human-inedible plant material some animals like rabbit could be fed. But that is SO FAR from being an agricultural industry capable of feeding the masses that it's totally irrelevant to any large (25M+) underfed population like North Korea. It's a simple fact (not my opinion - I love meat - I smoked a rabbit just last month and it was great) if you are looking to adequately feed a large population, animal agriculture is just not efficient.
But, yeah, even if North Korea wasn't any good for farming, there'd still be tons of stuff for a rabbit to eat.
"A" rabbit, sure. 25 million rabb
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I contemplated working out the surface area of north korea, estimating amount of available plant matter.
Then maybe doing simulations on just how much a typical poverty stricken family might have access to assuming that there wasn't some thug there preventing access...
Then I realised that I really just didn't care enough.
So, fine, whatever, maybe you're right. You're operating pretty heavily on assertions though.
Rabbits have been a fine food source in places like France for a very long time though, and a go
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Rabbits have been a fine food source in places like France for a very long time
An *occasional* supplemental protein source for families who already get enough calories, I agree. But not a significant cure for *starvation*! If you are staving are you going to grow your own alfalfa, etc, then spend time breeding, raising, etc rabbits for meat? Or just hope whatever vegetable matter you grew was enough to keep your kids from dying before your rabbits?
And not that hard to research, and kind of interesting (again, because I would like to see more rabbit in the US, but it's WAY more expe
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When the average person makes maybe $400/year and the elite gets access to many goods through official rationing that are otherwise black market only, then yes. It's enough to have servants and all sorts of expensive personal services you can't afford on $30k in the US.
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Two western movies / year and 1/4 a hair cut (half that of the leader)?
Sounds familiar (Score:1)
An intelligence agency maybe?
Do they get laid? (Score:2)
"North Korea reports increased imports of Fedoras as legions of self-styled hackers flood the state to compete for tech jobs."
all that and Email, too? (Score:3)
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Man, those were my prime hacking years. If I was getting started that late, I wouldn't be any good until I was 30.
I started late as well (30 something) I was learning assemble language on the TRS-80 3, The AmigA while a great system stopped me cold (no programs, even the basic was very broken).
I tried to get my son to learn hacking or at the least assemble language he had no interest.
So tried hard, failed due to the system I was using.
A more glamorous NSA (Score:1, Insightful)
This sounds no different from intelligence agencies in the western world. However, we're going to sensationalize it because it's happening in a country we don't like.
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The Vietnamese had a general Gap, and England has a Watford Gap.
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Actually, I believe the Vietnamese had a General Giap. [wikipedia.org]
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The i is silent.
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So, what are we going to do about the cyber-gap?
We already had nuclear weapon gap, bomber gap, and icbm gap.
The cyber gap is here [gap.com].
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We must not allow a mineshaft gap!
Mostly done. Mostly. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you are an oppressed society like this, or communist in general, it is in your interest, and the benefit of your family, to work hard to make Dear Leader's country look good on an international stage.
The Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union used to let Olympic athletes keep goodies from the West, like radios and blue jeans. If they brought home gold, especially in premier events like women's figure skating or pairs, that meant massively upgraded family apartments assigned to you, or even a resort dachau, like the higher ups get.
Can you imagine the hellish pressure on such young people?
This was a perverse aping of capitalism, but without any real economcic freedom.
There is a lot more to freedom than freedom of speech, if concern for the general welfare is your shining ideal. Give up on command and control.
Re:Mostly done. Mostly. (Score:4, Funny)
I hear it's a gas, but be decisive - once you've made a bookingwald it's difficult to auswitch.
Re:Mostly done. Mostly. (Score:5, Funny)
I hear it's a gas, but be decisive - once you've made a bookingwald it's difficult to auswitch.
Jew makin some horrible puns. Anne Frank-ly, I don't appreciate them.
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Nah. It's in your interest to stay as much off the radar of the Dear Leader and his buddies radar as possible. The second one of them perceives you as a threat you and your family is up for disappearance.
They will go to great lengths to treat famous people well, because you can't disappear those discretely. Random nerds, not so much. One of these elite hackers will be killed the second the leaders perceive that person as a threat.
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Just a warning economic freedom does not mean personal freedom and in fact, the economic freedom to own and sell people is completely contradictory to personal freedom. Cconomic freedom is a complete and total lie based around denying people to freedom to access resources to survive and economically enslaving them under threat of starvation and killing or enslaving if the attempt to freely access those resources. Economic freedom is directly opposed to personal freedom. Truly believe in freedom, then do no
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Please, stop saying that those countries are communist, communism is another thing, even URSS was not a communist society, those things are called dictatorship.
Communism is democracy on the hands of workers and peasants. When military or a single man owns all the powers of a nation this is not communism. They can use a state centralized economy, they can abolish private property but this is irrilevant to the concept of communism. Communism allow private property and its primary goal is not abolish freedom f
Great for South Korean IT (Score:2)
1) Big win for South Korean IT departments - You can always blame any failures/problems on the elite North Korean hackers !
2) Big win for US security firms selling all kinds of 'Cyber Warfare' defence systems.
3) Just as likely to be bullshit propaganda (see point 1 and 2).
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Mod parent up. (Score:3)
So 1,800 "cyber-warriors" crash 48,000 machines. Or ... each "cyber-warrior" crashes 27 machines. Yeah. Big threat there.
And crashing 48,000 machines? What is "elite" about that?
This sounds less like "a sophisticated cyber-warfare cell" and more like a few script-kiddies. If you want to cause damage then you search for Excel files and you make a few, random changes to the numbers. Do the same with any database files you can find.
And, lastly, you NEVER crash a machine. You want to maintain control for as lon
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It totally depends on your goal. If you want to immediately disrupt all communications, financial transactions, etc in preparation for an attack, you probably want to crash a lot of those machines (and by crash of course that means disable, not just reboot).
An the article already said it was a particular 48,000 machines that ended up taking down several South Korean TV stations and banks. 1800 "soldiers" taking out significant resources in South Korea near instantly? Sounds a hell of a lot more effective
Anyone else (Score:3)
Read that as University Of Automatons?
Movie Time! (Score:3)
And free movies!
Cut them off from the rest of the world? (Score:1)
Um, can we as a world community, just cut the cables to N. Korea and then the only hacking they can do is internal to their country?
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Um, can we as a world community, just cut the cables to N. Korea and then the only hacking they can do is internal to their country?
And how is that in the interests of the PRC exactly? Or are you suggesting we do the same thing for mainland China?
What gets me is that anyone who is part of this hacking elite has to be allowed access to the Internet... which means they're going to know what the rest of the world is really like. Seems to me like this would be a good hunting ground for tech companies in the PRC, assuming that this team as a whole is actually any good at what it does. Having to start from scratch at age 17 puts them at a
Are they actually elite? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't see neckbeards in any of the approved styles, so I don't see how they can actually be elite.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/... [time.com]
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And me with no +1 mod points.
Hey! Do they get more mod points in N. Korea? I'm packing my bags.
Oh wow, what insane luxury... (Score:3)
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How much do software engineers get ? 300k ?
What country are you from, and do they have an H1-B visa program?
Well yea, they get to use electricity. (Score:3)
A handpicked elite? (Score:1)
In every other country military hackers are just randomly chosen idiots!
Propaganda? (Score:1)
Anyone notice how there has been an up-tick in North Korea related news in the past few weeks? Almost always about something that is not like western culture, or something the western folks should be concerned about... I've seen this on /., but also on traditional news and other digital news sites. It almost seems like someone somewhere is trying to sway public opinion to justify aggression against North Korea. I may seem paranoid, but I prefer to think of it as being disillusioned with mainstream media
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The greatest reward (Score:2)
The greatest reward is an old porn magazine, locked in a heavily guarded room, in and underground bunker, with three rows of barbered wire around it. After a year of service a young hacker is rewarded with 15 minutes of solitude inside.
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...
That's a play on 'Window Licker', isn't it...
WTF's the problem ... (Score:2)
... Sony was born in a goddam barn.
Maybe sony should have (Score:2)
Drop from this netblock
210.52.109.0 – 210.52.109.255 [24]
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It takes just one of those elite hackers literate enough to read about this [encyclopediadramatica.se].
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They have a great life (Score:2)
Until they walk into a barbershop.