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back to article Norks hacks 90 Southern officials, journalists

South Korea is accusing the North of using online attacks to target 90 diplomats, security officials, and journalists and of breaching 56 accounts run by such folk. The attacks were thought-out and well constructed. Email account credentials were stolen through targeted spear-phishing linked to 27 domains setup to lure …

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  1. Baldy50

    After the attack in 2014 the DPRK found itself off the WWW a couple of times for many hours and blamed the US for this outage.

    Since you need to have government permission for Internet access most people don't, only a very small percentage of their population do.

    So if the general public can't find out what's going on in the world I say shut them down if it's no use to the masses what use is it but to allow gov, sanctioned attacks and misinformation to be spread, you'll still have to deal with sympathetic offshore groups hacking of course.

    Pull the plug along with the rest of the sanctions!

    1 0 Reply
    1. DocJames
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      Nice idea

      but I think cutting off the only link that even government officials have to the outside world would be considered a Bad Thing.

      If the aim is to allow the system to collapse under the weight of it's own contradictions, a la Eastern Europe, then allowing open communication with as much of their population as possible is helpful. They are, of course, aware of this and that's why they have such limited access.

      EDIT: and I suspect their internet link to the rest of the world is via China (probably a solitary cat5 cable strung over the border), so you'd have to persuade North Korea's greatest protectors and fans to cut it off. Good luck with that.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Alan Brown Silver badge
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        Re: Nice idea

        "you'd have to persuade North Korea's greatest protectors and fans to cut it off."

        That would be Russia, not China. The chinese put up with the Norks as a buffer between them and the decadent west but they don't particularly approve of what they do (oil and electricity supplies have been cut off on several occasions, but the Norks keep getting most of their stuff over the russian border)

        Of course if the Koreas were unified, then the USA/UN would have no mandate to stay on the peninsula and the US military bases at Okinawa would probably close or be drastically scaled down too.

        3 0 Reply
    2. GrumpyOldBloke
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      If you pull the plug how will the Western hackers keep an eye on them?

      0 0 Reply
  2. smartypants

    Intelligent species

    Honestly, here we are in the 21st century, a supposedly intelligent species, and we're still largely ruled by a mix of religious nutters, maniacs and egomaniacs, and if that weren't bad enough, ordinary people like nothing better than to find reasons to hate each other.

    History repeating itself time after time after time.

    Frankly, it would be an utter embarrassment for our species to 'take our place' among the intelligent species in the universe (if there are any) I'm so glad that it's just us who have to put up with the sad mess we call the human race, as I can't imagine any civilisation on earth lasting more than a few hundred years before we slump into the next cataclysm, pinning us safely on this planet for as long as it takes for the arthropods to do us in for good.

    (Sorry.)

    3 0 Reply
    1. David Pollard
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      Re: Intelligent species

      Don't apologise.

      1 0 Reply

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