A North Korean defector has warned the West that Pyongyang has an army of 6,000 hackers, capable of penetrating any computer system in the world.
According to the North Korean Professor, Kim Heung-Kwang, who defected to the West in 2004, Pyongyang spends 20% of its defence budget on obtaining and maintaining significant cyber warfare capabilities.
Professor Kim Heung-Kwang, who spent 20 years teaching in a North Korean University, told the BBC that North Korean Armed Forces have a special branch devoted to cyber warfare, called Office 121, which is also responsible for electronic warfare operations.
According to Professor Kim Heung-Kwang, the capabilities of Office 121 are so advanced that North Korean hackers can attack systems of cities, which are hostile to Pyongyang, putting the lives of thousands of people around the world in danger.
He says that the hackers of Office 121 have developed a malware virus with capabilities similar to the Stuxnet virus that the U.S. and Israel developed in order to knock out nuclear facilities in Iran.
An alleged example of the capabilities of Office 121 is the cyber-attack against the servers of Sony Pictures Entertainment on the 24th of November 2014. In this case it is thought that hackers managed to steal personal information about Sony Pictures’ employees and their families, including e-mails between employees, as well as other information.
The hackers involved in the attack called themselves the Guardians of Peace and demanded that the release of the film, The Interview, in the American cinemas be cancelled.
The film was a political satire about a plot to assassinate the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un. FBI officials, who evaluated the software, the techniques, and the network sources used in the hack against Sony Pictures, alleged that the cyber-attack was sponsored by North Korea.