North Korea Runs Hackers’ Unit

Military authorities have confirmed that North Korea is collecting information from South Korea through computer hackers.

Song Young-keun, commander of confidential operations, stated on May 27 in his opening speech for the “Conference for National Information Security” at the Korean Air Force Assembly Hall, “Under the direct order of Kim Jong-il, North Korea has been using its elite hacking unit to collect information from our national institutions and research facilities.”

With the support of the then-Soviet Union, North Korea had opened a five-year university in Mirim-dong which Pyongyang called as the Pyongyang Automation University (a.k.a. Mirim University), producing 100 military computer specialists each year.

“North Korea has changed name of Pyongyang Automation University to ‘Kim Il Military University’ in the early 90s and has been assigning most of its graduates as officers under the reconnaissance division’s computer hacking unit,” a confidential operations personnel explained.

Furthermore, North Korea opened the “Computer College” at the Kim Il-sung University in 1998, and runs the “Chosun Computer Center” out of Mankyungdae, Pyongyang where they train specialized programmers.

The U.S. Department of Defense had released a report in 2001 stating, “North Korea and China’s computer hacking capabilities have reached the level of that at the CIA.”

In response to this revelation, the confidential operations established the “Center for Information Warfare Countermeasures” in November of last year, consisting of the Cyber-terror Countermeasures Team and the Info-communications Infrastructure Protection Team.

Ho-Won Choi bestiger@donga.com