Australia Vulnerable to Korean Hacking Army

Nan writes "An army of more than 500 hackers hired by the North Korean military could find Australian businesses a "softer target" than their U.S. or European-based counterparts, according to security experts. The hacking army's mission is to break into South Korean, Japanese and American corporate networks to gather intelligence and steal trade secrets, according to reports."

It sounds familiar...

[Cronopios]

I mean, it's just what the U.S. has been doing for years [thenewamerican.com], wiretapping business and private conversations all over the world.

Quote:
According to a report commissioned by the European Union, entitled Development of Surveillance Technology and the Risk of Abuse of Economic Information, the system has, since the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, been partially dedicated to industrial espionage.

According to the New York Times, the report claims that information gleaned through Echelon helped U.S. aerospace firm Boeing win a lucrative Saudi Arabian contract away from a European competitor, and that Echelon was used to help the American company Raytheon "win a bid for a $1.3 billion surveillance system for the Amazon forest away from Thomson-CSF, a French company."

If its becoming more clear N Korea is hostile

[Trogre]

... surely we can just cut their net cables?
No net access, low hacking risk.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Sensitive information on the net?

[n54]

Amen to that, any company (or individual, or government department) really serious about security practices physical seperation (when possible) with a strictly controlled, non-constant, individual data transfer across the physical gap (ie. no network interconnection, even for a limited amount of time) in addition to using all "ordinary" security measures. Not too many companies so far but I've seen some do it.

However most governmental systems seem to not do this well enough or be able to... North Korea (or any other cybercombatant) wont hack personal webpages or the mom'n'pop shop, they'll hack the power distribution grid, big corporate databases to introduce fiscal instability (this seems to be the weakest link as physically seperating it defeats its purpose and is basically the same method of operation as Osama Bin Laden but by different means; a "quick way" to manipulate markets for enormous gains), gridlock choice network areas (routers, DNS, DDoS) and similar unless they're just snooping.

The North Korean "crackers" are probably closer to scriptkiddies though, but it's not something one wants to underestimate (some kiddies learn).

Re:easier dealt with than nuclear war

[horrens]

don't know how other goverments handle this but here in estonia some goverment organisations don't connect their networks to the internet, all employees have 2 computers one for the sencitive data in the central network and for internet and other stuff

Re:This is nuts.

[mikrorechner]

Why not just cut them off from the internet?

Because you would either have to invade or cut off China to do that (source [kotra.or.kr]).

Re:This story sounded like bullsh*t a week ago

[notmatt]

I agree, this is one of the funniest things I've read in a long while. Also quite insulting if you are a Australian security professional. The article might as well read "Australians can't secure their computer networks, they are all going to get hax0red. On the other had US networks are so much better secured. We are nice and safe over here. When information gets nicked we are going to blame the Australians." Sounds like a pile of bullsh*t to me. Shouldn't this story have been posted under the obviously-crap-and-poorly-researched-stories-that- make no-sense dept

Re:This is nuts.

[davesplace1]

The North Korean goverment needs to grow food for their people, not get the rest of the world mad at them.

All of APNIC blocked

[unics]

We have blocked all of APNIC at our firewall. No traffic can goto or come from any IP address within the APNIC range. Too many attempts to hack our systems have come from APNIC ranges. The number of hack attempts have been reduced to coupious amounts to only a hand full.