Tag Archive for: South Korea

What’s the price of growing North Korean cyber capabilities?

There’s growing concern amongst analysts, and government officials alike that North Korea has begun to rapidly accelerate its development of advanced offensive cyber capabilities. I explored this in a recent journal article, which drew together open source material to provide an assessment of some of the motivations for North Korean developments in this area, and examine how they’ve used this capability. During 2013 evidence and sources emerged detailing North Korea’s prolonged targeting of its southern neighbours. You can read more about this in the article, but here I look at some of the potential impacts for South Korea and the region as a whole.

South Korea is in a strong economic situation, boasting one of the world’s most technologically advanced economies, with a well-developed broadband infrastructure and a strong digital economy across the public and private sectors. This highly networked economy brings increased vulnerabilities that are being exploited in cyberattacks. There are various consequences for South Korea, the most important of which is the reputational damage economically, politically and internationally that accompanies appearing vulnerable to cyberattacks. Read more

Information warfare on the Korean peninsula

DPRK propaganda poster

Over the last decade, security dilemmas on the Korean peninsula have become progressively more ‘hybrid’ and multi-faceted. Traditional conventional threats, scenarios and contingencies linked to high intensity conventional wars, have been converging with a range of asymmetric and non-linear security challenges, including nuclear threats, ballistic missiles, and increasingly information and cyber warfare. According to General James Thurman, commander of US forces in South Korea, North Korea has acquired ‘significant’ IW-related military capabilities. This is an attempt to explore the idea of asymmetric negation, probing any vulnerabilities of the US–ROK alliance. Now, that means more than just nuclear weapons. In addition to its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, these also include hacking, encryption, and virus insertion capabilities.

In this context, information and cyber warfare is becoming a part of the ongoing conflict on the Korean Peninsula, and its threats and risks are continuously challenging traditional defence strategies and operational concepts of the US–ROK alliance.

I argue that we really are in a new regime of information warfare in Korea, where both North and South Korea are engaged at three levels of information conflict simultaneously: (1) a war for information to obtain information and intelligence about each other’s means, capabilities, and strategies; (2) a war against information aimed at protecting their information systems, while disrupting or destroying the other side’s information infrastructure; and (3) a war through information reflected in the misinformation and deception operations to shape their broader internal and external strategic narratives. Read more