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I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

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Re: I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

#101
post #52

i hope no poor IT engineer in NK and his family for 10 generations isnt going to be sent to workcamps because of this joke.

The only person to blame for that behavior is the chaotic and capricious dictator taking these actions against the population he is oppressing.

Re: I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

#102

Such an attack is, IMO, morally dubious. North Korea is a poor country with millions of starving citizens, and rather than sending food aid, you broke down their only comms to the rest of the world?

Any attack on any sufficiently large structured system will indirectly harm those who depend on it, irrespective of how unjust, dangerous, and/or corrupt it might be. That does not make resistance inherently immoral. If we permit these institutions to take their subjects as hostages and refuse to confront that kind of monstrous behavior for what it is, we permit those institutions to continue abusing their populaces forever because they will never stop of their own volition.

Every resistance action carried out by every resistance group against tyranny throughout history has been washed in the blood of people who did nothing wrong.

Re: I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

#103

I'm unsure on the ethics of this. Yes only the elite have the internet, but also the internet is likely used internally for communication, which is important for resource distribution. I don't give two shits about the elite in NK, but the starving folks living there have my deepest sympathy. I'm lucky to have a lot of advantages, and I can't help but see many of them as an accident of birth.

The only person responsible for the starving people in NK is their dictator that keeps them in those conditions.

Re: I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

#104
post #48
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The starving, and heavily repressed citizens do not have access to the internet in NK. This attack did not affect any of them to any extent. Whom it did affect a bit, hopefully, were the people complicit in the repressive dictatorship that runs the country. The repressive dictatorship that engages in, among many other bad things, scams and online fraud to partially finance the country. For this they of course use the…

Good result. There's rarely such a thing as a clear, objectively simple 'good result' for this sort of action because outcomes have knock-on effects. For example, if the North Koreans responsible for maintaining internet access were executed over this that diminishes the result significantly.

Good point, but the original comment was about whether the hacker was morally dubious, not the outcomes. If a bad actor does bad things because of what you did, you're not morally responsible for it — he is.

Re: I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

#105
post #70

How much exposure of the regular internet do North Korean hackers have? What are the odds of turning them?

None. This was a middle finger to the NK State apparatus and that's about all.

Not true, there are/were North Korean hackers actively using platforms like Hackerone and other lesser known SaaS that haven't implemented KYC for training.

Re: I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

#106

Such an attack is, IMO, morally dubious. North Korea is a poor country with millions of starving citizens, and rather than sending food aid, you broke down their only comms to the rest of the world?

It's not like he went in out of pure malice or anything though, they were trying to hack him first. Not saying it's some morally pristine thing, but it definitely communicated what it was trying to communicate.

As an analogy, we should have empathy for homeless people stuck in poverty, but if one of them continually bikes to your house and tries to break in, is it morally dubious to eventually take their bike chain rather than just shooing them away each attempt? I imagine the moral razor would fall on similar lines.

Re: I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

#107

Such an attack is, IMO, morally dubious. North Korea is a poor country with millions of starving citizens, and rather than sending food aid, you broke down their only comms to the rest of the world?

It's not like he went in out of pure malice or anything though, they were trying to hack him first. Not saying it's some morally pristine thing, but it definitely communicated what it was trying to communicate. As an analogy, we should have empathy for homeless people stuck in poverty, but if one of them continually bikes to your house and tries to break in, is it morally dubious to eventually take their bike chain r…

Regarding your analogy: I think it would be more like taking the bikes of every homeless person as opposed to just the one. Would that make it more or less morally dubious?

Re: I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

#108
post #95
post #92

I'm shocked that he shows his face and identifies himself willingly

Big "lifelock" vibes...and if I understand it correctly, that lifelock character has had his identity successfully stolen and impacted multiple times. Sometimes the person who says "I'm really smart, like mensa level", does some really ignorant and stupid things.

Sometimes you're also just hoping to find someone or something out there that interests you.

Re: I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

#109
post #13
post #2

Why isn’t he in prison? I mean, going by the West’s own laws, or the spirit of them, anyway. Unless he is part of said West’s Armed Forces, in which case this would get really close to a casus belli .

"the West" has to keep some degree of not officially caring to avoid being backed into a policy corner and has no incentive to take law enforcement action when threat actors in those other countries operate with impunity. We're already well into causus belli territory with NK, but nobody wants to go there: https://x.com/tarah/status/1798036415932187127

That link doesn't really explain what exactly it's talking about, it's a single reply with the original post invisible and all replies invisible. It speaks of a cyberattack without mentioning which one.

Re: I'm the hacker that brought down North Korea's Internet for over a week. AMA

#110
post #51

These supposed messages between him and the state department lead me to believe it's either all or mostly exagerations or lies: https://imgur.com/a/s-lX6inGA Maybe it's just my lack of knowledge of some regionalism, but doesn't it seem very odd that a technical person would use "in the open source", to refer not to code, but to a PR article on some news website?

I was getting kind of similar vibes. When they reveal the story, it’s basically “traceroute identifies 2 choke point routers, and I DDoSed them with traffic”.

That’s cool and neat for guerrilla warfare, but I would assume the NSA and DoD are already aware of that possibility? I wouldn’t even be surprised if they saw the DDoS happening on network monitoring tools. Why clandestine meetings for that?

I get why the media is interested, it’s an awesome story.

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