Increased use of the Internet by North Koreans: ongoing hacking targets?

According to Google Trends, in September 2019, there was a significant increase in bitcoin usage and searches on the internet.

A study published by Inikt Group very recently showed that North Korea has seen a 300% increase in its Internet use over the past 3 years. According to this latest study, the intentions behind this increase would be unhealthy, to something ready. We think more about the use of cryptocurrencies in a context of computer hacking and especially blackmail on the net.

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As we know, the Korean state has never really collaborated with Western institutions. In recent times, North Koreans currently believe that a coalition is being created between the Americans and the Europeans in order to put his economy. They see their sovereignty as a threat, so they have decided to counter-attack this time on the ground of the Internet. In this way, the authorities state deploy enormous resources to carry out a counter-attack against the Western invader. And computer hacking seems to be one of the weapons envisaged by the latter.

According to the U.S. CyberSecurity Division intelligence, the North Korean state adopts a rather aggressive tactic, cybercrime, and this is through many actions such as cryptocurrency scams or hacking targeted at sensitive installations. The idea of succeeding in escaping the various economic sanctions through the system Internet.

It is surely in this context that the study puts them by Insikt Group headlines: "How North Korea revolutionized The Internet as a tool for rogue regimes." It then reveals that the first people involved in this operation are usually military or political elites.

With the use of the internet as a battleground or as a weapon, it is even more difficult to detect the threat, or even anticipate it. And as we already know, digital assets, i.e. cryptocurrencies and other alternative means of exchange on the web, the authorities have no control over this. In this way, difficult to track the transaction as would have been possible in the framework of conventional currency. "We have seen at least ten times the increase in Monero mining activity from North Korean IP beaches since May 2019. We believe that Monero's anonymity and lower processing power requirements probably make Monero more attractive to North Korean users than Bitcoin," the study noted at the time. Thus making the Internet a fairly attractive platform for North Koreans on various aspects, including military. "This includes not only the use of the Internet as a revenue-generating mechanism, but as an instrument for acquiring prohibited knowledge and skills, such as the development of North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs and cyber operations. The study notes.

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