Transcript
I was able to find a website to help assist me in finding a country to do my forum on. It lists several countries and has a description under each of them that mostly consist of how they get/got their software, targets, purpose of attack, suspected acts, suspected offensive teams, etc. It does start out mentioning that over 60 countries either developing tools or already have them for computer espionage and attacks, (Yadron & Valentino-DeVries, 2015). The Wall Street Journal did some extensive research and found a few things. It showed:
29 countries now have formal military or intelligence units dedicated to offensive cyberefforts.
49 countries have bought off-the-shelf hacking software.
63 countries use cybertools for surveillance, either domestically or internationally (Yadron & Devries, 2015).
After looking through some of the countries, I decided to cover North Korea. South Korea reported that North Korean hacker force consist of more than 5,000 (Yadron & Valentino-Devries, 2015). They develop their software within the country rather than buying it somewhere else. They are also likely to target internationally rather than domestically. Their suspected offensive teams are military or intelligence. The purposes of their attacks are surveillance and destruction. There has been a couple of suspected attacks from them as well. Those are:
2013: Discovery of “Kimusky” espionage attacks on South Korean targets.
2014: Destruction and leaking of data at Sony Pictures Entertainment (Yadron & Valentino-DeVries, 2015).
North Korea has been focusing more on cyber attacks since it costs less making nuclear weapons. They actually scouted and picked from universities. Some start training when they are 17 and not only them, but their families are given high social status even during training. Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has 1,800 hackers within their largest unit known as Unit 121. Each unit has different types of tasks and this unit is disables command control and communications.
North Korea allies itself with China in order to help further themselves. In order to help North Korea, them and China jointly run a hotel. This hotel assists in housing hackers that live and work in China, (Lynch, 2014). Some of those in North Korea work in China in order to get more resources and use the internet there. China favors this because it means that they can cut North Korea off when/if they see fit.
There has been dozens of attacks within the past 10 years that North Korea has been connected to. The attack North Korea has been that people are more likely to know about is when they attacked Sony Pictures Entertainment because of the movie “The Interview.” At least a couple of those involve South Korea. They were able to shut down several of their websites by way of denial of service attacks, stolen millions of dollars, and more. In just one attack, they were able to shut down 40 of South Korea’s website.
It is not believed that they have enough sophistication as of now to be considered too dangerous. “… Jason Healey, director of Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. ‘We’ve been warning about a digital Pearl Harbor since 1991 and it hasn’t happened’,” (Lynch, 2014)
Lynch, D. (2014, December 22). North Korea Cyberwarfare: What We Know About The DPRK's 1,800 Hackers After The Sony Attack. Retrieved May 12, 2016, from http://www.ibtimes.com/north-korea-cyberwarfare-what-we-know-about-dprks-1800-hackers-after-sony-attack-1764914
Yadron, D., & Valentino-DeVries, J. (2015, October 11). Cataloging the World's Cyberforces. Retrieved May 12, 2016, from http://www.wsj.com/articles/cataloging-the-worlds-cyberforces-1444610710
