michael.bacon@grimbaldus.com
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2017 08:47:23 +0100
To quote from the linked article:
Once North Korea counterfeited crude $100 bills to try to generate hard cash. Now intelligence officials estimate that North Korea reaps hundreds of millions of dollars a year from ransomware, digital bank heists, online video game cracking, and more recently, hacks of South Korean Bitcoin exchanges.
One former British intelligence chief estimates the take from its cyberheists may bring the North as much as $1 billion a year, or a third of the value of the nation's exports.
The North Korean cyberthreat crept up on us, said Robert Hannigan, the former director of Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, which handles electronic surveillance and cybersecurity. ``Because they are such a mix of the weird and absurd and medieval and highly sophisticated, people didn't take it seriously, how can such an isolated, backward country have this capability? Well, how can such an isolated backward country have this nuclear ability?"
Surely this is asking something of the wrong question, and sadly, typically so of governments?
The main issue is not how N Korean got so good at hacking, it's how the West got so bad at security!