Kim Heung Gwang, the president of North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS) and a one-time computer science college professor in the North, is confident that this week’s cyber attacks on South Korean entities were done by North Korea, and says they must be regarded as attacks on the South Korean state.
“I think these acts of cyber terror were done by North Korea,” Kim declared during a presentation on the attacks in Seoul this morning. “Clearly, intelligent, ongoing attacks on major South Korean financial institutions and media companies must be seen as attacks against the country itself.”
“Hacking is a typical asymmetrical strategy for North Korea,” he added. “Thus, even when we are attacked there is no way to retaliate and nothing to attack. North Korean hackers adhere to the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics of the Kim Il Sung anti-Japanese partisans.”
“I was told personally that the North Korean hackers active in China plan to ‘attack South Korean mobile users’ next,” he added. “But in truth we are totally defenseless on mobile security.”
“Even if the user is not using their camera phone, hackers can make it work and get information out of that,” he explained by way of example. “Taking personal information is a piece of cake for them.”
“There are something like 3,000 North Korean hackers, but only 20 or 30 have been dispatched to China,” he explained. “The rest are based in the Munsin district of Pyongyang near the Taedong River and elsewhere, analyzing software, researching mathematical processing methods to penetrate firewalls, cracking passcodes and analyzing the social behavior of users.”
