“The Lazarus Heist” explains North Korea’s wild hacking spree | Hacker News Reader

“The Lazarus Heist” explains North Korea’s wild hacking spree

economist.com

17 pointsjkuria12 comments

It's curious that cybercrime in the news is almost always attributed to enemy state actors like Russia, China and North Korea. Don't western countries have hacker groups, other than ideological groups like Anonymous?

Blaming North Korea for cybercrime is a convenient way of 1) shifting focus from uncomfortable facts (e.g. if the hacker group comes from an ally, or is domestic) - 2) justify our inability to do anything about it, and 3) to further western propaganda surrounding North Korea. Continually blaming North Korea for things without proof is one way of justifying the severe economic sanctions/blockades that have been in place for decades.

i recently wrote a comment about how america can "justify" stuxnet attack on iran as a "display of capability of usa and israel" but in the same breath they are quick to "attack on our critical infrastructure is an act of war against our great nation and we must respond".

you can hit the other guy and call it a win but god forbid if the other person hits back, then its a matter of hurting your pride. meh.

huawei has been on the grill for "secret backdoor" for quite some time now and as far as i remember, no "proof" has been given yet western states have been quick to follow suit in banning their equipment. on the contrary, intel and amd have documented backdoors in their CPUs by nsa/cia but that's "fine", no big deal....

USA can spy on germany, uk, which is documented but if there is even an alegation of the same being done by china, all hell breaks loose.

this is the reason why many countries around the world are switching to RISC-V platform, away from X86 because america can and has shown multiple times that they can "strongarm" those companies to simply quit a market and exert pressure. people don't want that.

>this is the reason why many countries around the world are switching to RISC-V platform

And also the reason why RISC-V Foundation, originally US-based, is now Switzerland-based.

Ah, like Crypto AG?

From the "who benefits?" pov, there are lots of military/state security people who stand to gain status, attention, budget etc by painting online crime as conflict between countries. In the private sector it's the opposite, companies don't want to talk about how they've been victims of breakins.

> It's curious that cybercrime in the news is almost always attributed to enemy state actors like Russia, China and North Korea. Don't western countries have hacker groups, other than ideological groups like Anonymous?

It is just a matter of propaganda. Notice how in europe almost every crime was attributed to islamists. And then, after some days, they change the story.

Probably because it’s hard to function as a nation (or a person) if you are constantly being hypercritical of any hypocrisies. We would all drown in a sea of self-hatred and convert to vegan monks with no cars or possessions.

That's really a non-sequiteur. The alternative to being critical of state and media propaganda is not the same as retiring from society altogether.

You are describing France basically and it is still running correctly.

They are under severe economic sanctions. It is entrepreneurship for them.

I hadn't really thought about it before, but I believe North Korea has an 840 mile border with China, which is not hostile to them.

So I don't understand how sanctions by other more distant countries could meaningfully affect them if China did not choose to acquiesce.

Either China is oppressing them, or it's an internal problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93North_Korea_bord...

This was a very interesting podcast series from the BBC.

https://overcast.fm/+smMNGrg0w

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