Do North Korean hackers exist only in the imagination of South Koreans?

An interesting piece in StrategyPage asks whether we can trust the reports on growing cyber-attacks by North Koreans leaked by the South Korean military and intelligence services (in fact, I was surprised to hear Estonia’s defense minister use the increase of attacks on South Korea as evidence that cyberwarfare is a growing threat during last week’s cyberwarfare conference in Tallinn).

StrategyPage makes an intriguging argument that the graduates of the mysterious Mirim College – North Korean factory of cyberwarriors – may not be as skilled as the South Koreans present them.

For the last five years, one of the enduring questions among computer security people was, "where are the mysterious, elite North Korean hackers?" For nearly two decades, the South Korean media has been reporting on the cyberwar capabilities of North Korea. All of this revolves around activity at Mirim College, a North Korean school that, since the early 1990s, has been training, for want of a better term, computer hackers. The story, as leaked by South Korean intelligence organizations, was that a hundred cyberwar experts were graduated from Mirim College each year. North Korea is supposed to have, at present, a cyberwar unit of nearly a thousand skilled hackers and Internet technicians. South Korean intelligence believes the North Korean have a unit of at least a hundred very good hackers who have been ordered to scout out the South Korean government and military networks.

It was long thought that it was more likely that those Mirim College grads were hard at work maintaining the government intranet, not plotting cyberwar against the south. Moreover, North Korea has been providing programming services to South Korean firms. Not a lot, but the work is competent, and cheap. So there is some software engineering capability north of the DMZ. But now there is the growing evidence of North Korean hackers at work.

When was the last time you saw a sophisticated technology come out of North Korea? StrategyPage thinks that North Korean cyberwarfare capabilities would be quite limited – perhaps, matching those that South Korea itself had a few decades ago!

So do the North Korean cyberwarriors exist, or are they a creation of South Korean intelligence agencies trying to obtain more money to upgrade government Information War defenses? North Korea probably has some personnel working on Internet issues, and Mirim College does train Internet engineers. North Korea probably has a unit devoted to Internet based warfare. But we know that North Korea has a lot of military units that are competent, in the same way robots are. The North Koreans picked this technique up from their Soviet teachers back in the 1950s. North Korea is something of a museum of Stalinist techniques. But it’s doubtful that their Internet experts are flexible and innovative enough to be a real threat. South Korea has to be wary because they have become more dependent on the web than another other on the planet, with exception of the United States. As in the past, if the north is to start any new kind of mischief, they will work it on South Korea first. So whatever the skill level of the North Korean hackers, they will attack South Korea first.