Justin McCurry reported for The Guardian and give a quick update on N. Korea’s recent, ridiculous threats. However, buried in the article was this mention of a possible cyberattack by a N. Korean defector:
The regime’s next move could be to break into US computer networks to steal information and spread viruses, Jang Se-yul, who defected to the South in 2008, told the Observer. North Korea’s hackers are suspected of being behind recent cyberattacks that paralysed computer networks at several South Korean banks and broadcasters.
“It would demonstrate that North Korea is a strong cyberpower,” Jang said. “Their prime target is the US, and they’ve been preparing for something like this for years, including when I was there in the 1990s. I can’t say how successful they would be, but it’s a possibility.”
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While we’re on the subject, Richard Falkenrath wrote for CFR and responded to the question “What does the worst-case scenario of a cyberattack on the United States by another state or by terrorists look like?”
Falkenrath explained that there are three categories of cyberattack: personal (invading a person”s private information), economic (an attack on the financial system), and physical (ala ol’ Stuxie).
Unfortunately, rather than answering the question, Mr. Falkenrath sorta dodged and made light of it:
But how bad could the worst case be? Given the extremity of the possibilities, the answers to this question are more likely to come from Hollywood than CFR. Indeed, technology gone wrong has been one of the great themes of science fiction, starting perhaps with Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. For a more recent depiction of a truly worst-case cyberattack, see James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator and its dystopian sequels.
Welcome to post-Stuxnet America (via Flickr Commons, Terminator, Hemdale Film Co.)
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