North Korea vs USA – a Cyber War has been started

North Korea which is a democratic country located in East Asia whose capital is Pyongyang is continuously testing his hydrogen and nuclear bombs. As war of words heats up, even US President i.e. Trump says that “Second Option” would be Devasting for North Korea.

According to recent reports, On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that US Cyber Command has been carrying out denial of service(DDOS) attacks against North Korean hackers affiliated with the Reconnaissance General Bureau. The attacks attempt to overwhelm their computers and the Internet connection with traffic making them slow or impossible to use. That means the new Russian connection went online just after the US Cyber Command attack ended.

That this DDOS cyber attack was non-destructive and temporary suggests it could be considered more as a warning than a punishment. It is Cyber Command telling North Korea that it has its range and is capable of much stronger action.

This isn’t the first time North Korea has had alternate routes for Internet connectivity.

Now a major russian telecommunications company(TransTeleCom – TTK) will provide the new internet connection to North korea and this new link supplements one from CHINA and will connect all the lines over North Korea to the end.

TTK which is one of the Russia’s biggest telecommunication companies and a subsidiary of the Russian railway operator. The cabling has apparently been in place under an agreement between TransTeleCom and Korea Posts and Telecommunications Corp since 2009.

“DDoSing the Reconnaissance General Bureau might not affect the hackers outside of North Korea directly,” F-Secure’s security adviser Sean Sullivan told SecurityWeek, “but it could possibly hamper communications, forcing them to use other (potentially monitored?) channels.”

The new internet route which they’ve already started by Sunday at around 0900 UTC on October 1 was clearly unstable for about 3 hours but now its more stable as far from the sources.

Perhaps the earliest instance of a nation waging cyberwar was the Stuxnet worm which is a botnet malware but the next cyber war would be in between US and North Korea. This online warfare already affects wreaks havoc on the physical world.

Kim Heung-kwang, a former computer science professor in North Korea who defected to the South in 2004 and still has sources inside North Korea, said Pyongyang’s cyber attacks aimed at raising cash are likely organized by Unit 180, a part of the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), its main overseas intelligence agency.

“Unit 180 is engaged in hacking financial institutions (by) breaching and withdrawing money out of bank accounts.” – Kim told Reuters.

In June last year, police said the North hacked into more than 140,000 computers at 160 South Korean companies and government agencies, planting malicious code as part of a long-term plan to lay the groundwork for a massive cyber attack on its rival.

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