North Korean Megaweapon: Malware In Games, Porn

from the duke-nuclear-power? dept

Sharing time: I'm quite afraid of a lot of things in this life. Clowns, for instance, as well as female cats that just had kittens. Oddly, the Harris Bank lion has scared me since my childhood. Very small rocks. The American South. But, honestly, I'm not afraid of North Korea. Their threats tend to amount to piss-poor photoshopped pictures and videos that might be terrifying if their own enemies hadn't produced the footage for them. Now, I get that North Korea's government is a horrible threat to its own people and I dream nightly of the day when those people will be freed from their current leader and his never ending Bond-villain impression, but they just don't feel all that threatening to me. Why? Well, because their threats always seem to amount to a dud bottle-rocket, relatively speaking.

Take the latest dire warning out of South Korea, for instance, which amounts to reviled North Korean hackers trying to insert malware into software produced in North Korea for use in DDoS attacks.

In the latest criminal case, a North Korea hacker disguised himself as a software developer and offered to make online gaming programs for the arrested South Korean businessman at much cheaper prices than South Korean software developers, the NPA official said.

The North Korean-developed gaming programs, for which “thousands of dollars” had been paid by the arrested South Korean businessman, were all confiscated before spreading online, he said, adding if the programs had been developed by South Koreans, the price tag would have been much higher.

Er, okay, so "thousands of dollars" were spent by a South Korean on North Korean programming that went nowhere and then the South Korean was arrested. And, yes, South Korea is occasionally the target of DDoS attacks that likely come from the North, but so what? Nobody is buying North Korean games en masse, should such things even exist. And, while I'm sure they have some talented techno-mancers in North Korea, why would using their programmers to produce games when that practice is illegal and likely better talent exists elsewhere ever become a trend?

Now -- and this is just a crazy out there suggestion -- but what if those North Korean programmers actually made a game worth some money, distributed it to those countries still willing to do business with them, and then, oh, I don't know, used the income to feed their own people on occasion? I know that doesn't make you a super-cool mega-villain, Supreme Leader, but at least it'd be more effective than constantly cleaning the egg off your face.