North Korea's cyber army has become a sophisticated and dangerous hacking machine — and "the whole world needs to take notice," The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
According to the Journal, the rogue nation's fingerprints have shown up in an increasing number of cyberattacks, the skill level of its hackers has vastly improved and their targets are more worrisome.
"The whole world needs to take notice," John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc., told the Journal.
The firm now ranks North Korea among the world's mature hacking operations, the Journal reported — noting that as recently as March, suspected North Korean hackers appear to have infiltrated Turkish banks and invaded computer systems in the run-up to the Winter Olympics.
Experts tell the Journal that North Korea has been showing surprising levels of originality in its coding and techniques — and a willingness to go after targets such as central banks and point-of-sale systems.
The rogue regime is also cultivating elite hackers much like other countries train Olympic athletes, defectors and South Korean experts tell the Journal — identifying students as young as 11 to train as hackers and to learn how to develop computer viruses.
"Once you have been selected to get into the cyber unit, you receive a title that makes you a special citizen, and you don't have to worry about food and the basic necessities," a source told the Journal.
The source, who studied software programming and hacking for six years at North Korea's top technical university before defecting to South Korea three years ago, said recruits get nice apartments and are exempted from military duty.
But the cyber army recruits also undergo intense preparation for annual "hackathon" competitions in Pyongyang, in which teams of students holed up learning to solve puzzles and hacking problems under severe time pressure.
"For six months, day and night, we prepared only for this contest," the source said. "It was everyone's dream to be a part of it."
Top performers get jobs foraging for money via websites of overseas banks or targeting computer networks for intelligence in countries such as the United States, the source told the Journal.
"To maintain the nuclear program and build more weapons and maintain the North Korean regime, a lot of hard currency is needed, so naturally attacking banks is of first importance," the source told the Journal.
According to the Journal, North Korea's cyber army has about 7,000 hackers and support staffers, loosely divided into three teams: The A team attacks foreign entities and is associated with North Korea's most headline-grabbing campaigns, like WannaCry and Sony Pictures attacks.
The B team traditionally focused on South Korea and swept for military or infrastructure secrets, researchers told the Journal. The C team does lower-skilled work, such as targeted email attacks called spear phishing.
Experts told the Journal there are plenty of signs showing the hackers are greatly improved — acting on security glitches in widely used software only days after vulnerabilities first appear, and crafting malicious code so advanced it is not detected by antivirus programs.
In particular, they are earning a reputation as innovators at breaking into smartphones, hiding malware in Bible apps, or using Facebook to help infect targets, the Journal reported.
North Korea's hacking program dates at least to the mid-1990s, when then-leader Kim Jong Il said "all wars in future years will be computer wars." But its prowess made headlines in 2014, when cyber thieves knocked Sony Corp.'s Pictures Entertainment's computer systems offline, erasing company data and stealing emails that became public.