May 18, 2025: Westerners, especially Americans, are under attack by a persistent, tenacious and largely unnoticed Cyber War campaign . The crimes include identity theft, massive hacking efforts, extortion and employment fraud. At this point, it’s time to remind everyone about the North Korean involvement.

Since the 1990s the world has known about the Cyber War threat from North Korea. All of this revolves around activity at Mirim College, a North Korean school that, since the early 1990s, has been training, for want of a better term, computer hackers. Every year a hundred or more Cyber War professionals graduate from Mirim College. North Korea is supposed to have, at present, a cyberwar unit of several hundred Cyber War experts, skilled hackers and Internet technicians. On the other hand, it is more likely that those Mirim College grads are hard at work maintaining the government intranet, not plotting cyberwar against the outside world. Moreover, North Korea has been providing limited programming services to other nations. The work is competent, discreet and cheap. These efforts are largely invisible to the outside world. Few people realize that the North Koreans are up to any mischief, or anything at all.

North Korea's efforts are particularly ominous. Only the most elite hackers do their work without leaving behind any tracks, or evidence. Some have maintained that, because North Korea's Internet connections come from China, the North Korean cyberwarriors could be cleverly masquerading as Chinese hackers. However, after several decades, there should be some visible signs of North Korean hacking. It’s highly unlikely that the North Korean hackers have been able to wander around the net without leaving some signs. While North Korea has produced some competent engineers, we know from decades of examining their work that they don’t produce super-scientists, or people capable of the kind of innovation that would enable North Korean cyberwarriors to remain undetected all these years.

So do the North Korean cyberwarriors exist, or are they a creation of foreign intelligence agencies trying to obtain more money to upgrade their own Cyber War protection? North Korea probably has some personnel working on Internet issues, and Mirim College probably does train Internet engineers. North Korea probably has a unit devoted to Internet based warfare. But we know that North Korea has a lot of military units that are competent, in the same way robots are. The North Koreans picked this technique up from their Soviet teachers back in the 1950s. North Korea is something of a museum of Stalinist techniques. But it’s doubtful that their Internet experts are flexible and innovative enough to be a real threat. South Korea has to be wary because they have become more dependent on the web than any other nation on the planet, with the exception of the United States. As in the past, if the North starts any new kind of mischief, they will try it on South Korea first, or maybe not. So whatever the skill level of the North Korean hackers, they will most likely do something unexpected.

In the last several years several Cyber War Security firms have raised the alarm about the North Korean threat. This is why major defense corporations have long employed hardened defenses against fake identities, hacking attempts and detection evasion. Solutions have been found but many firms don’t bother to employ them. For example, immediate verification of identity and personal information makes it nearly impossible to perpetuate false identity problems. The problem is, it only takes one failure to do this property for North Korean or their proxies, to infiltrate a large organization. This isn’t paranoia, as these mishaps do occur. For publicity purposes, most firms keep these mishaps out of the news. After all, who would believe such rubbish?

There are no foolproof, perfect solutions. While many people will believe warnings of a North Korean menace, few will do anything about it and nothing happens. Such silence is golden to the North Koreans. Can you detect anything now? No. Good, the North Koreans are pleased.