So, Is That a Challenge?

by Robert Koehler on September 3, 2008

You know, this just doesn’t seem like a smart thing to say.

{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }

1 soondae September 3, 2008 at 11:38 pm: Rather like the tamper-proof chastity belt.
2 R. Elgin September 4, 2008 at 12:29 am: This must be their way of requesting a hack-test. Korea has been the playground for the Chinese hacker for some time now.

Read up on it here: http://www.thedarkvisitor.com

What is also sad is how the main ISPs in Korea commit criminal acts and employees thereof regularly do business with spammers — people who have tight connections with a wide variety of criminal activity other than merely sending out unsolicited e-mail.

Currently Hanaro.com (soon to change their name out of embarrassment for having been caught and punished), Korea Telecom and Powercomm have all been caught selling customer data to marketers and this is just the tip of what these guys do.
3 Billy September 4, 2008 at 8:46 am: @ Robert;

that is not just a challange, but a global advertisement for a system test.

@ R. Elgin;

Totally agree with you. Privacy, personal, data wise or digital is Iill a very foreign concept here, despite the increasing amount of information theft, bank phishing, etc.
4 Seoulchild September 4, 2008 at 9:14 am: Please read the first sentence again.

A Defense Ministry spokesman assured Tuesday that the department’s cyber-security system is “hacker-proof,” adding that its intra-net computer data network is detached from the external Internet.

It’s a private network; no one would be able to hack it unless they were able to gain access from the inside.
5 Seoulchild September 4, 2008 at 10:00 am: BTW, I have no idea who Tuesday is, but he/she must be quite important to be the only person to be assured of the Defense Ministry’s computer security measures.
6 Richardson September 4, 2008 at 10:09 am: Air gaps are nice, but their backbone runs over the same fiber as everyone else.
7 Tripod September 4, 2008 at 10:18 am: “It’s a private network; no one would be able to hack it unless they were able to gain access from the inside.”

Only if the whole system is contained within one building and cut off from the outside.
8 Tripod September 4, 2008 at 10:25 am: #2,

Phone phishing has gotten quite bad in recent months. I get a call every day or two. The latest one has been nothing but static, probably so I call the number and get taken with a huge surcharge on my phone bill. Maybe I’m naive, but it seems to me like it would be very easy for the phone company or the cops to find out who’s behind those calls since the numbers show up on caller ID…and yet the calls keep coming.
9 Lazy_Contractor September 4, 2008 at 10:53 am: “It’s a private network; no one would be able to hack it unless they were able to gain access from the inside.”

Thats basically true. Many companies, agencies, and what not run their own intra-nets. In theory it would be IMPOSSIBLE to hack. But nothing is 100% safe. I am sure people can think of ways of beating the protections. But the ways to beat those measures are considerably difficult or require tons of luck.

All-in-all, you cannot connect to a network that is disconnected from the internet. The physical (or virtual) connection is needed.

Again though – advertising that your network is “hacker-proof” is just stupid and invites people of the hacking culture to make aggressive attempts to thwart that organization’s security.
10 downloader September 4, 2008 at 11:14 pm: Yeah, it protected from outside hackers – until someone cross connects a switch, or someone else put a wireless internet USB device into one of the machines (so they can check their email), or until a female NK spy starts asking someone who works there to download some stuff onto a USB stick for her – and load a password sniffer on it at the same time.

The biggest threat is always human – inside or out of the system. You might be able to stop the outsiders, but you still have to let someone in to operate the system.

And if their configuration has laptops that people can take off site, you can bet that someone will take one home, bypass the security, load Warcraft (or whatever the popular game is now) on it and connect it to the interwebs. Or simply leave it on a train for someone else to find.

I know – I’ve seen it.
11 downloader September 4, 2008 at 11:15 pm: Yeah, it protected from outside hackers – until someone cross connects a switch, or someone else put a wireless internet USB device into one of the machines (so they can check their email), or until a female NK spy starts asking someone who works there to download some stuff onto a USB stick for her – and load a password sniffer on it at the same time.

The biggest threat is always human – inside or out of the system. You might be able to stop the outsiders, but you still have to let someone in to operate the system.

And if their configuration has laptops that people can take off site, you can bet that someone will take one home, bypass the security, load Starcraft (or whatever the popular game is now) on it and connect it to the interwebs. Or simply leave it on a train for someone else to find.

I know – I’ve seen it.