The World Once Laughed at North Korean Cyberpower. No More.<br />Seven months later, during joint military exercises between American<br />and South Korean forces, North Korean hackers, operating from computers inside China, deployed a very similar cyberweapon against computer networks at three major South Korean banks and South Korea’s two largest broadcasters.<br />It may have been a copycat operation, but Mr. Hannigan, the former British official, said recently: "We have to assume they are getting help from the Iranians." And inside the National Security Agency, just a few years after analysts had written off Pyongyang as a low grade threat, there was suddenly a new appreciation<br />that the country was figuring out cyber just as it had figured out nuclear weapons: test by test.<br />It turned out that visitors to the Polish regulator’s website — employees from Polish banks, from the central banks of Brazil, Chile, Estonia, Mexico, Venezuela,<br />and even from prominent Western banks like Bank of America — had been hit with a so-called watering hole attack, in which North Korean hackers waited for their victims to visit the site, then installed malware in their machines.<br />"Cyberwarfare, along with nuclear weapons and missiles, is an ‘all-purpose sword’<br />that guarantees our military’s capability to strike relentlessly," Kim Jong-un reportedly declared, according to the testimony of a South Korean intelligence chief.<br />But his attitude began to change in the early 1990s, after a group of North Korean computer scientists returned from travel abroad proposing to use the web to spy on<br />and attack enemies like the United States and South Korea, according to defectors.<br />Both the United States and South Korea have also placed digital "implants" in the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the North Korean<br />equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents that Edward J. Snowden released several years ago.<br />A South Korean lawmaker last week revealed that the North had successfully broken into the South’s military networks to steal<br />war plans, including for the "decapitation" of the North Korean leadership in the opening hours of a new Korean war.
