How can North Korean have top talented hackers? Aren’t their technology and information stuff generally outdated?

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I have frequently read news like “North Korean hackers” hacked into a company’s account and stole data, money, etc. In everyone’s impression though, North Korean is a country that has outdated techonology and poor economy development. Their citizens therefore should have bad education.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

They are trained relentlessly and ruthlessly once they show any talent. As is often in dictatorships, having a useful talent will get your family privileges. The average citizen is uneducated but the government will provide for you if they think they can use you.

Anonymous 0 Comments

>Their citizens therefore should have bad education.

Yeah, most of them probably do. But that doesn’t mean their top-tier talent isn’t highly educated. That’s honestly true of basically every country in the world. I mean in the US only about 36% of people can identify North Korea on a map. But that doesn’t mean the US doesn’t have incredibly smart well educated people.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It does seem a bit of a paradox. Essentially, the North Korean government specifically trains hackers. They find young people with certain gifts–like a knock for certain types of mathematics or problem-solving–and they put them through special methods of training and education to cultivate those gifts and direct them toward various means of hacking. If you’re interested, “The New Yorker” had a comprehensive article about the subject.

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

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think it helps a lot that they can escape the consequences, and so get all the tries they want.

Like if a Greek citizen breaks into an American system and they figure who it is, there will be a legal process where America will talk to Greece, and the person will be arrested and possibly extradited. So at the first failure, it’s game over.

But if the same person is in NK instead, what’s the US going to do? NK isn’t going to cooperate and in fact the attacker is doing what NK wants. The US can’t apply diplomatic pressure because everyone on the US side already hates NK as it is, so you can’t really sanction them any more. And going in with weapons is a non-starter. So effectively nothing happens, and the NK hacker gets to try again, and again and again until they get what they want.

Anonymous 0 Comments

First of all, they’ve got plenty of computers there. They have their own linux-based OS. Lots of educated people who can be trained.

You don’t need much more than an internet connection and some free courses to learn how to reliably break into your average company’s network, though that “more” is something usually only governments are good at having: millions of dollars

There’s a grey market of zero-day vulnerabilities (publicly unknown bugs in software like OS’s and browsers) where governments and anyone else with deep pockets can buy that knowledge. Finding those vulnerabilities in software is something that requires lots of talent, but the market means DPRK doesn’t need to foster that talent on its own. They can just skip the hardest part with cash.

You can also use publicly known vulns against targets that haven’t patched their systems, but that’s less reliable. Or use any number of social engineering techniques. But $$$ will mostly just solve that part of the problem for you

Anonymous 0 Comments

A lot of stuff you hear about North Korea is propaganda, either from NK or America.

So really, North Korea probably has a lot better technology than you’re giving them credit for, and probably a lot of “North Korean Hackers” are just unsolved hacking things that the media knows they can sensationalize to get more clicks if they blame it on North Korea.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I suspect that the grey area between what we are told about North Korea and what actually happens in North Korea is vastly bigger than we imagine.

And the same applies to almost every country/community out there that Western governments (used as an example as I suspect most of us consider ourselves as Western inclined) want to portray as bad (or good).

Anonymous 0 Comments

>Their citizens therefore should have bad education.

Not all of them. When I was in China studying chinese, there were a few north korean students in the same program as us (different section/level). They looked well-off enough and educated enough to be allowed to leave and study chinese abroad.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They have nukes and ICBMs. I’m sure they can buy a few hundred top of the line PC’s from their ally, China.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The enemy being both incredibly weak and incredibly strong at the same time is a key component of fascist propaganda. North Korea is both a nation which is full of outdated technology which can’t even fire a rocket outside of the border but also a country filled with elite hackers which could reliably guide a warhead across the world.