The regime in Pyongyang has sent hundreds of programmers to other countries. Their mission: Make money by any means necessary. Here's what their lives are like.
In most respects, Jong Hyok looks like any other middle-aged male tech worker you might see on the skyscraper-shadowed streets of Seoul’s Gangnam district: smartphone in hand, dark-blue winter coat over a casual, open-collared work shirt. Sit him down at a sushi restaurant and start asking him questions, though, and you soon sense that Jong is harboring an extraordinary tale. He slouches, staring intently at the table before him and speaking haltingly, his sentences often trailing away unfinished.
Jong tells you he’s in his late 30s, but his tired eyes and wizened skin make him look a decade older. He says he’s concerned that you’ll be indiscreet with details that could expose him or his family. You wonder momentarily if he suspects you’re a North Korean spy. But no, you’re here to relate the remarkable story of his years spent cracking computer networks and programs to raise money for the regime in Pyongyang.
North Korea’s hacking prowess is almost as feared globally as its nuclear arsenal. Last May the country was responsible for an internet scourge called WannaCry, which for a few days infected and encrypted computers around the world, demanding that organizations pay ransom in Bitcoin to unlock their data. A few years before that, North Korea stole and published the private correspondence of executives at Sony Pictures Entertainment, which had produced a Seth Rogen satire of the country called The Interview.
Jong wasn’t involved in those attacks, but for half a decade before defecting, he was a foot soldier in North Korea’s hacker army. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, who might seek to expose security vulnerabilities, steal corporate and state secrets, or simply sow chaos, North Korean hackers have a singular purpose: to earn money for the country, currently squeezed by harsh international sanctions for its rogue nuclear program. For most of the time Jong spent as part of this brigade he lived and worked in a crowded three-story home in a northeastern Chinese city. The hackers he shared it with were required to earn up to $100,000 a year, through whatever means they could, and were allowed to keep less than 10 percent of that. If they stepped out of line, the consequences could be severe.
Experts in the South Korean government say that over the years, North Korea has sent hundreds of hackers into neighboring countries such as China, India, and Cambodia, where they’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars. But actually finding one of these cyberwarriors is, for obvious reasons, difficult. Sources in South Korea’s government and the North Korean defector community provided Bloomberg Businessweek with the name of someone who has deep knowledge of the latter group—a fixer of sorts. This contact, a middle-aged man who chose his words with painstaking deliberation, asked that his name not be used. After several meetings, he offered the phone numbers of three contacts, requesting that Businessweek shield their identities. Jong—which is not his real name—was one of them.
For decades, North Korea’s government has sought to use modern technology to transform one of the most isolated, impoverished parts of the world. During the 1990s, Kim Jong Il, the father of current leader Kim Jong Un, touted programming as a way for the country to rebuild its economy after years of catastrophic famine. He established technology degrees at Pyongyang’s universities and attended annual software-writing contests to put gold watches on the wrists of winners.
Reports from Korea watchers suggest that, sometime in the back half of the decade, Kim Jong Il formed a cyber army designed to expand North Korea’s hacking activities. Initially the unit managed only random incursions, on targets like government websites and banking networks, but when Kim died in 2011, his son expanded the program. Soon it was launching attacks more consistently and on more important targets, such as nuclear plants, defense networks, and financial institutions.
Formally, North Korea denies engaging in hacking and describes accusations to that effect as enemy propaganda. It says its overseas computer efforts are directed at promoting its antivirus software in the global market. The country has for more than a decade been working on such programs, including one called SiliVaccine. It also has a homegrown operating system, Red Star, that software developers have pointed out looks suspiciously like macOS. Kim Jong Un’s affinity for Apple products is well-known. In 2013, he was photographed sitting in front of an iMac during a meeting with military officials to discuss missile attacks on the U.S.; a picture released a few years later showed him with an Apple laptop on his private jet.
Kim has also moved to make more smartphones available to North Korea’s 25 million citizens and begun rewarding computer scientists with nicer homes and higher salaries. And he’s sent increasing numbers of them into neighboring countries, where internet access is better and they can more easily hide their tracks. Defectors say programmers cross the border clutching bean paste, hot pepper paste, dried anchovy, and other comforts of home.
“Elite programmers? No way. We were just a bunch of poor, low-paid laborers”
Jong was part of an earlier wave sent by Kim Jong Il. Born in Pyongyang during the early 1980s, he was raised by parents who were faithful to the Workers’ Party of Korea and Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder, who led the party and is Kim Jong Un’s grandfather. Growing up, Jong heard tales of his own grandfather’s brave fight against Japan’s imperial army in Manchuria alongside Kim Il Sung during World War II.
As a child, Jong’s favorite subject was biology, and he aspired to become a doctor. His parents were supportive, but the state determined from his test scores that he should study computer science. There was no questioning the decision. Heartbroken at first, he eventually became fascinated by the inner workings of computers, and in his junior year of university, in the late 1990s, he was selected by the government to study in China.
The years he spent there were a revelation. A government minder accompanied each delegation, but Jong’s was lax, and he managed to go drinking, dancing, and camping with Chinese students. The biggest shock was having almost unlimited access to the internet. The computers back home were so strictly controlled that they were useful mostly for calculating figures or displaying diagrams. The ones in China showed Jong much more of the world. “I felt like a colt cut loose on the field,” he says.
For a brief moment, North Korea seemed to be moving in a more open direction. During school breaks, Jong would return home to find that some of his wealthier friends owned personal computers. They played video games like Counter-Strike and watched DVDs of South Korean soap operas, which were becoming so easy to obtain that Jong almost believed unification was at hand. Soon, though, government authorities were storming homes to confiscate such material in a crackdown on the so-called yellow wind of capitalism.
Jong graduated and returned home to get his master’s degree, for which he worked at a state agency, creating office software. The government was at the time investing in a variety of tech projects, including one that used power lines to transmit data. Once again, Jong glimpsed hope that the regime might see technology as a means for advancement, not just a threat.
After graduation, he went to work for a state-affiliated software development agency. Before he could settle in, the government informed him that it had other plans. He was being moved to China, to conduct software research that would “brighten the future” of North Korea’s information technology sector.
Jong knew exactly what that meant: Go make money for your country.
Not long after, Jong crossed the border on foot and caught a bus to his assigned city. There, he made his way to a relatively large house set on a busy street amid a forest of high-rises. The place was owned by a Chinese tycoon with business ties to Pyongyang. Dozens of graduates from North Korea’s elite universities—all men—slept in cots and bunks on the top floor. A warren of cubicles and computers occupied the lower floors, and portraits of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung hung on the walls.
At first Jong didn’t have a computer, so he borrowed one from his roommates, promising to pay a rental fee once he’d made enough money to buy his own machine. He began his new career by obtaining beta versions of commercial software such as video games and security programs, then making pirate replicas his clients could sell online. Orders came in via word of mouth and broker websites from around the world; many were from China or South Korea, allowing for easier communication.
Each unit was overseen by a “chief delegate,” a non-coder who arranged transactions and collected payments. A separate minder from North Korea’s state police was there to handle security issues. The work was arduous, involving reverse-engineering code and intercepting communications between the source program and the servers of the company that made it. Jong recalls that it took 20 programmers to build a functioning replica of one program. The hackers often found themselves racing to decipher vulnerabilities in a piece of software before its creators could patch the security holes.
Jong got up to speed quickly and was soon considered a senior member of the house. When orders were slow, he and his colleagues hacked gambling sites, peeking at the cards of one player and selling the information to another. They created bots that could roam around in online games such as Lineage and Diablo, collecting digital items like weapons and clothes and scoring points to build up their characters. Then they’d sell the characters for nearly $100 a pop. Every so often, to maintain the facade that he was pursuing research to benefit North Korea, Jong would create scholarly software, for example a data-graphing program, and send it across the border.
All in all, the work was unglamorous. “Elite programmers? No way. We were just a bunch of poor, low-paid laborers,” Jong recalls. He denies any complicity in the kinds of crimes that security experts have attributed in recent years to North Korea, such as snatching credit card numbers, installing ransomware on corporate servers, and swiping South Korean defense secrets. But he doesn’t doubt that such things were going on. “North Korea will do anything for money, even if that means asking you to steal,” he says.
More at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-07/inside-kim-jong-un-s-hacker-army
In most respects, Jong Hyok looks like any other middle-aged male tech worker you might see on the skyscraper-shadowed streets of Seoul’s Gangnam district: smartphone in hand, dark-blue winter coat over a casual, open-collared work shirt. Sit him down at a sushi restaurant and start asking him questions, though, and you soon sense that Jong is harboring an extraordinary tale. He slouches, staring intently at the table before him and speaking haltingly, his sentences often trailing away unfinished.
Jong tells you he’s in his late 30s, but his tired eyes and wizened skin make him look a decade older. He says he’s concerned that you’ll be indiscreet with details that could expose him or his family. You wonder momentarily if he suspects you’re a North Korean spy. But no, you’re here to relate the remarkable story of his years spent cracking computer networks and programs to raise money for the regime in Pyongyang.
North Korea’s hacking prowess is almost as feared globally as its nuclear arsenal. Last May the country was responsible for an internet scourge called WannaCry, which for a few days infected and encrypted computers around the world, demanding that organizations pay ransom in Bitcoin to unlock their data. A few years before that, North Korea stole and published the private correspondence of executives at Sony Pictures Entertainment, which had produced a Seth Rogen satire of the country called The Interview.
Jong wasn’t involved in those attacks, but for half a decade before defecting, he was a foot soldier in North Korea’s hacker army. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, who might seek to expose security vulnerabilities, steal corporate and state secrets, or simply sow chaos, North Korean hackers have a singular purpose: to earn money for the country, currently squeezed by harsh international sanctions for its rogue nuclear program. For most of the time Jong spent as part of this brigade he lived and worked in a crowded three-story home in a northeastern Chinese city. The hackers he shared it with were required to earn up to $100,000 a year, through whatever means they could, and were allowed to keep less than 10 percent of that. If they stepped out of line, the consequences could be severe.
Experts in the South Korean government say that over the years, North Korea has sent hundreds of hackers into neighboring countries such as China, India, and Cambodia, where they’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars. But actually finding one of these cyberwarriors is, for obvious reasons, difficult. Sources in South Korea’s government and the North Korean defector community provided Bloomberg Businessweek with the name of someone who has deep knowledge of the latter group—a fixer of sorts. This contact, a middle-aged man who chose his words with painstaking deliberation, asked that his name not be used. After several meetings, he offered the phone numbers of three contacts, requesting that Businessweek shield their identities. Jong—which is not his real name—was one of them.
For decades, North Korea’s government has sought to use modern technology to transform one of the most isolated, impoverished parts of the world. During the 1990s, Kim Jong Il, the father of current leader Kim Jong Un, touted programming as a way for the country to rebuild its economy after years of catastrophic famine. He established technology degrees at Pyongyang’s universities and attended annual software-writing contests to put gold watches on the wrists of winners.
Reports from Korea watchers suggest that, sometime in the back half of the decade, Kim Jong Il formed a cyber army designed to expand North Korea’s hacking activities. Initially the unit managed only random incursions, on targets like government websites and banking networks, but when Kim died in 2011, his son expanded the program. Soon it was launching attacks more consistently and on more important targets, such as nuclear plants, defense networks, and financial institutions.
Formally, North Korea denies engaging in hacking and describes accusations to that effect as enemy propaganda. It says its overseas computer efforts are directed at promoting its antivirus software in the global market. The country has for more than a decade been working on such programs, including one called SiliVaccine. It also has a homegrown operating system, Red Star, that software developers have pointed out looks suspiciously like macOS. Kim Jong Un’s affinity for Apple products is well-known. In 2013, he was photographed sitting in front of an iMac during a meeting with military officials to discuss missile attacks on the U.S.; a picture released a few years later showed him with an Apple laptop on his private jet.
Kim has also moved to make more smartphones available to North Korea’s 25 million citizens and begun rewarding computer scientists with nicer homes and higher salaries. And he’s sent increasing numbers of them into neighboring countries, where internet access is better and they can more easily hide their tracks. Defectors say programmers cross the border clutching bean paste, hot pepper paste, dried anchovy, and other comforts of home.
“Elite programmers? No way. We were just a bunch of poor, low-paid laborers”
Jong was part of an earlier wave sent by Kim Jong Il. Born in Pyongyang during the early 1980s, he was raised by parents who were faithful to the Workers’ Party of Korea and Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder, who led the party and is Kim Jong Un’s grandfather. Growing up, Jong heard tales of his own grandfather’s brave fight against Japan’s imperial army in Manchuria alongside Kim Il Sung during World War II.
As a child, Jong’s favorite subject was biology, and he aspired to become a doctor. His parents were supportive, but the state determined from his test scores that he should study computer science. There was no questioning the decision. Heartbroken at first, he eventually became fascinated by the inner workings of computers, and in his junior year of university, in the late 1990s, he was selected by the government to study in China.
The years he spent there were a revelation. A government minder accompanied each delegation, but Jong’s was lax, and he managed to go drinking, dancing, and camping with Chinese students. The biggest shock was having almost unlimited access to the internet. The computers back home were so strictly controlled that they were useful mostly for calculating figures or displaying diagrams. The ones in China showed Jong much more of the world. “I felt like a colt cut loose on the field,” he says.
For a brief moment, North Korea seemed to be moving in a more open direction. During school breaks, Jong would return home to find that some of his wealthier friends owned personal computers. They played video games like Counter-Strike and watched DVDs of South Korean soap operas, which were becoming so easy to obtain that Jong almost believed unification was at hand. Soon, though, government authorities were storming homes to confiscate such material in a crackdown on the so-called yellow wind of capitalism.
Jong graduated and returned home to get his master’s degree, for which he worked at a state agency, creating office software. The government was at the time investing in a variety of tech projects, including one that used power lines to transmit data. Once again, Jong glimpsed hope that the regime might see technology as a means for advancement, not just a threat.
After graduation, he went to work for a state-affiliated software development agency. Before he could settle in, the government informed him that it had other plans. He was being moved to China, to conduct software research that would “brighten the future” of North Korea’s information technology sector.
Jong knew exactly what that meant: Go make money for your country.
Not long after, Jong crossed the border on foot and caught a bus to his assigned city. There, he made his way to a relatively large house set on a busy street amid a forest of high-rises. The place was owned by a Chinese tycoon with business ties to Pyongyang. Dozens of graduates from North Korea’s elite universities—all men—slept in cots and bunks on the top floor. A warren of cubicles and computers occupied the lower floors, and portraits of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung hung on the walls.
At first Jong didn’t have a computer, so he borrowed one from his roommates, promising to pay a rental fee once he’d made enough money to buy his own machine. He began his new career by obtaining beta versions of commercial software such as video games and security programs, then making pirate replicas his clients could sell online. Orders came in via word of mouth and broker websites from around the world; many were from China or South Korea, allowing for easier communication.
Each unit was overseen by a “chief delegate,” a non-coder who arranged transactions and collected payments. A separate minder from North Korea’s state police was there to handle security issues. The work was arduous, involving reverse-engineering code and intercepting communications between the source program and the servers of the company that made it. Jong recalls that it took 20 programmers to build a functioning replica of one program. The hackers often found themselves racing to decipher vulnerabilities in a piece of software before its creators could patch the security holes.
Jong got up to speed quickly and was soon considered a senior member of the house. When orders were slow, he and his colleagues hacked gambling sites, peeking at the cards of one player and selling the information to another. They created bots that could roam around in online games such as Lineage and Diablo, collecting digital items like weapons and clothes and scoring points to build up their characters. Then they’d sell the characters for nearly $100 a pop. Every so often, to maintain the facade that he was pursuing research to benefit North Korea, Jong would create scholarly software, for example a data-graphing program, and send it across the border.
All in all, the work was unglamorous. “Elite programmers? No way. We were just a bunch of poor, low-paid laborers,” Jong recalls. He denies any complicity in the kinds of crimes that security experts have attributed in recent years to North Korea, such as snatching credit card numbers, installing ransomware on corporate servers, and swiping South Korean defense secrets. But he doesn’t doubt that such things were going on. “North Korea will do anything for money, even if that means asking you to steal,” he says.
More at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-07/inside-kim-jong-un-s-hacker-army
