Anonymous and North Korea

Hactivist attacks on North Korea have followed the announcement that they were behind the attacks on Sony.  There are two articles I want to mention as representing the view that these attacks are not very successful, and may prove to be dangerous.  I think both of them might be premature thinking. 

The first is Ian Bremmer’s article for Reuters called When hackers bully a bully:  Anonymous vs Kim Jong-un.  His premise in this article can be summed up in this statement –“Anonymous knows how to hack, but it has no insight into how North Korea might respond to a cyber-invasion – and likely won’t be the target if North Korea decides it must retaliate. Western powers aren’t exactly anxious to defend cyber-anarchism or to pay the price for its excesses.” 

The second article is by Max Fisher in the Washington Post, Hacker Group Anonymous is no Match for North Korea.  Fisher says the attacks on North Korea have been largely ineffectual and some claims of their success exaggerated.

It takes time to sort these things out and both of these authors should look at what happened when Anonymous and Telecomix started hacking Syria after it cut off Internet connectivity for its people in 2013. 

Anonymous launched what it called Operation Syria in which they stole records from the Syrian Railways, the Parliament, the Patent Office, and Syrian TV and published these stolen items for anyone to read.  They tinkered with the websites of Syria’s embassies in a few countries.  Other groups joined them, collecting and releasing more.  Perhaps the most interesting thing was a set of records on how the Syrian government was monitoring its own citizens. Telecomix, another of the Internet activist groups, released records of a monitoring tool called Bluecoat, software made in the U.S.A.  The software allowed the Assad government to monitor how and where its own citizens were using the Internet.  It took months for that whole story to emerge and the implications to peek out. 

Anonymous is not one thing, nor are they the only activists who hack.  Governments generally do not like this kind of activity and discourage it because of what Bremmer says are the unintended consequences of hacking a government, especially a whacko one like North Korea.  North Korea and China, through one of its senior military officials, are the only two countries to threaten us with nuclear attack, which is not very credible.  It is easier to believe they might take action over a movie.  Governments want to take time to get the attribution right, and get the response right.  Governments are looking at deterrence and how we might prevent such things from happening again.  Activists do something right away,  even it is doesn’t work out very well.

Our government threatens to do something, eventually.  They use the Chinese strategy of war to strike at a time and place of their own choosing when they have an advantage.  The response doesn’t have to be quick and waiting for it creates its own kind of reward for the attacker.    Since we don’t have a really good deterrence for these kinds of events, we will have to wait and see which approach works best in the long run.