I’ve been following North Korean cyberattacks on the South for several years, so it was interesting to see the South’s Ministry of Defense announce (English, Korean) yesterday that it was already doubling the size of its Cyber Command, to 1000 people. Given it just launched the command in January 2010, deciding to increase the size already indicates the seriousness with which it views the threat of North Korean cyber attacks, plus the easy availability of funding for this new arena of conflict.
North Korean cyber attacks on the South include jamming GPS signals (forcing planes at Inchon international airport to use alternate systems when landing and taking off), locking up to 30 million account holders (a number which seems awfully high, but I’m quoting the article) out of Nonghyup, the South’s main agriculture and cooperative bank, and hacking the email accounts of Korea University’s Graduate School of Information Security (one of the South’s top schools). With public, embarrassing attacks such as these, the North has certainly caught the attention of the South’s defense and cyber establishments, helping drive the expansion in funding and personnel resources.
The added capabilities are to include both defensive and offensive programs, with the second being the more interesting of the two. Given North Korea’s much more limited use of the Internet – essentially a few elites conducting research and military/intel groups looking for information and opportunities – the well-wired South has far more to lose in an online confrontation than the hardscrabble North. Combine Southern reliance on the Internet with the difficulty of definitively tracing the origin of a cyber attack, and, expanded capabilities or not, the South looks to lose a few more rounds of this battle.
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