On the one hand, sceptics argue that there are serious limitations to North Korea’s use of cyberspace for political purposes, particularly at the strategic level. Varying previous assessments over the years have fueled an ongoing debate on the direction, character, capabilities, and strategic impact of North Korea’s cyber operations. Each source carries internal and external validity risks, including government bias and political agendas, outdated data, and intelligence blind spots. and ROK governments select North Korean defectors with partial knowledge of North Korea’s cyber activities secondary literature such as think tank reports and academic articles and, ultimately, references in North Korean newspapers and other media outlets. Accordingly, the available open-source data are limited mainly to threat intelligence reports and investigations by global cybersecurity firms select statements and publications by the U.S. Any assessment of North Korea’s evolving cyber operations and the strategic rationales underlying them, is a challenging task, not only because attribution is a recurring point of contention but also because of the closed nature of the country’s totalitarian government and society. Prior to the analysis, a caveat is in order. As Kim reportedly declared in 2013, “cyberwarfare, along with nuclear weapons and missiles, is an ‘all-purpose sword’ that guarantees our military’s capability to strike relentlessly.” Ĭonsequently, North Korea’s twenty-first-century cyber operations have essentially become weapons of mass effectiveness working alongside the weapons of mass destruction in its nuclear arsenal, together composing a unified asymmetric political strategy designed to pressure the United States and the wider international community to recognize as legitimate Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s interpretation of North Korea’s sovereignty and security. This has been augmented only recently with a second internet link to Russian networks, and dispersion of its hackers to select countries worldwide, including India, Nepal, Kenya, Mozambique, and Indonesia. At the same time, North Korea also has been able to protect its critical infrastructure from potential reprisals, limiting its access, dependencies, and vulnerabilities on the internet and communication networks by relying instead primarily on China’s internet infrastructure. North Korean hackers, operating largely outside the country, have spearheaded fraudulent cyber operations to circumvent sanctions, gaining access to the international financial system and illegally forcing the transfer of funds from financial institutions, SWIFT banking networks, and cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide. Indeed, since 2014, the trajectory of North Korea’s cyber operations shows an increasing priority on cyber-enabled economic and political warfare, in which North Korean cyber units and state-sponsored hacking groups aim to counter international sanctions, while generating resources for North Korea’s economic and technological development. These include patterns of cyber espionage and distributed denial of service attacks on select political and socioeconomic targets in South Korea, to cyber-enabled information, economic, and political warfare globally. Since 2009, North Korea’s cyber operations, organizational structures, and capabilities have evolved with divergent tactics, techniques, and procedures. Seoul and Washington need a full-spectrum military readiness posture against the full range of potential North Korean provocations, while European democracies need to strengthen their cyber readiness posture to effectively track and counter North Korea’s evolving global cyber operations. North Korea aims to gain strategic advantage by pursuing cost-effective, asymmetric military capabilities, including cyber strategies, to gather intelligence, coerce its rivals, financially extort others, and otherwise exert influence in ways that are resistant to traditional deterrence and defense countermeasures. While the core security concerns of South Korea and the United States are North Korea’s growing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capabilities, the alliance must increasingly also prioritize the continuous development of North Korea’s cyber capabilities, both offensive and defensive. Pyongyang sees the Korean Peninsula as entrenched in a geopolitical deadlock among great powers, with the United States continuing to employ what the North Korean regime sees as a “hostile policy” detrimental to its survival, its ability to shape relevant events, and the country’s political and economic development.
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