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> you should really consider a level between "Mossad" and "not-Mossad": the sorts of people who hack crypto exchanges.

Bad example, since the biggest crypto hacker is North Korea.

> North Korean government-backed hackers have stolen the equivalent of billions of dollars in recent years by raiding cryptocurrency exchanges, according to the United Nations. In some cases, they’ve been able to nab hundreds of millions of dollars in a single heist, the FBI and private investigators say.*

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/10/politics/north-korean-hac...

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I always wonder about these "North Korean" hackers given that I've heard the average North Korean citizen's access to computers (and the outside internet) is extremely limited. Where are they getting these world class hackers from if this is the case?

It must be a group of outside parties who use North Korea as a mask and/or employer, right?

Or, when you're a quasi-religious dictatorship with strict information control, you just recognize math talent in 1st grade and funnel students into patriotic computer security-specific training.

North Korea has been ruled by the Kims for 74 years at this point.

A few computers aren't expensive for even a low-wealth country, and math is cheap to teach.

A few billion dollars hacked will pay for a lot of nice computers, even after the Kim skim.

DPRK 1%ers get a western education and have normal Internet access.

It’s not ideological, it’s practical; get a cybersecurity degree in the states/Europe and live “lavishly” with your family or flee and never see anyone you love again (they don’t kill them they’re just poor and in NK).

Do they need to be world class hackers?

> Where are they getting these world class hackers from if this is the case?

The New Yorker ran a piece on this recently-ish[1]:

  The most promising students are encouraged to use computers at schools. Those who excel at mathematics are placed at specialized high schools. The best students can travel abroad, to compete in such events as the International Mathematical Olympiad. Many winners of the Fields Medal, the celebrated prize in mathematics, placed highly in the contest when they were teen-agers.

They cultivate their math talent, and after graduation they offer them jobs in cyber espionage that beat their alternatives by a wide margin.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/26/the-incredible...

"offer"

There is a truly excellent series of Podcast from the BBC called "The Lazarus Heist", explaining in detail how the cyberwarfare capacity of North Korea is constitued, and what kind of attack they have done; I cannot recommend it enough.

The short version: they take their best math-inclined students, and send groups of them in China, to learn about computer hacking (and the world at large, to know what or who to hack). The group aspect serves as a self-surveillance check, to minimize risks of defections.

Uh, I doubt many/any of them are “crack a crypto algorithm” sophisticated.

These groups know how to buy exploits, attach payloads, and be persistent. Not trivial per se but hardly PhD math stuff…

They may very well be able to find their own 0-day exploits, which are far more likely to even exist than a "crack a crypto algorithm" method (which often just doesn't exist).

Not the ransomware crews, and def not when you’re pulling in 100mm+, it would lose you money to try…

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