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Comment by schwanky | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to accuse North Korea. They can't practically respond to the accusations because they have no outlet anyone reads, and if anyone did then nobody would care anyway.

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North Korea has Rodong Sinmun, which has an online edition in English. People interested in North Korean politics do read this newspaper.

- Website: http://www.rodong.rep.kp/en/

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodong_Sinmun

They also have KCNA, which they also use to communicate: http://kcna.kp

Hm. So I actually like the form of north korean websites, if these two in this thread are representative of the norm. :) No ads, no trackers, 0 resources blocked in uBlock, no CDNs, clean design not jumping around, to the point without useless stock photos... No modern "design", with thin grayed out unreadable fonts. No webfonts, clean html code. Interesting. :)

...unresponsive, loads articles in pop-up windows, uses http/1.1 so resources are downloaded serially, has all JS in critical path....

Implying that the hacking attributed to NK might have been a false flag?

Indeed another person quoted in the article suggests that the hacking might have come from China.

That's the wrong takeaway from that bit though I think. I believe they are saying that China and other states are the actors on behalf of NK not that they are using NK as patsies ... granted that may also be true. International politics and espionage is a weird domain.

I think the implication is that these are North Korean hackers stationed in China, not that China is doing it on their behalf.

NK trains up and operates hacking groups to generate income, not just to be unpleasant. So, guessing that would mean NK is renting out hacking services to China. Other ways to generate income from hacking is operating a ransomware gang, renting out botnets, and gathering banking passwords to use in draining accounts. We may assume they are involved in all of the above.

And if the systems are as vulnerable as one would think, then they are also an attractive target for a false flag operation, I'd think.

North Korea destroyed their own credibility.

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