South Korean MP Rhee Cheol-hee is claiming that North Korean hackers infiltrated his nation’s military network last year, copying 235 GB of sensitive data, including operational plans for the joint US-South Korea attack on North Korea.
Details on what happened are scant, and evidence that this was a real North Korean hack is non-existent so far. The Pentagon expressed confidence that its current plans for attacking North Korea are secure.
It’s not clear if that means the US doesn’t believe the hacking attack, or has simply moved on amid its constant threats of attacking North Korea to new plans, rendering what they had last September obsolete.
It’s not clear how different that plan might be. Rhee suggested that among the plans taken were plans to assassinate Kim Jong-un, a “decapitation” attack that would be part of a full-scale war to conquer North Korea and place it under southern rule.
It used to be that when a government got “hacked” that information was kept close to the vest rather than let the “attackers” know they succeeded. The “hack” itself should have been classified and not something a mere MP would make public…unless, of course, there was no “hack” nor loss of “sensitive data.”
The real outrage should be that a government has plans to assasinate a rival leader and has plans to attack a neighboring country. But the corporate press spins this such that the ‘evil’ is that someone hacked them and discovered the far greater evils that they were trying to plan in secret.
Planning to assasinate a rival leader is just fine in this modern corporate world. But discovering that someone is planning to do this, that we are told is evil.
The description of the plan is not “to assassinate a rival leader.” It is to “decapitate the leadership.”
The latter COULD include the former, or not. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. But any military contingency plan (whether predicated on an intention to preemptively attack or to respond to an attack) would include a strategy for “decapitating the [enemy] leadership” by cutting off C3I (Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence) so that the leadership neither knows what is going on nor can communicate orders to troops in the field.
This is bogus. South Korea’s never had anything resembling a war plan.