North Korea’s Embarrassing Missile Launch Failure May Have Been Caused By US cyber Attack

The Sun ^ | 4-16-2017 | Mark Hodge

[blam]

Former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind claims American intelligence has foiled similar nuke tests



THE US may have sabotaged Kim Jong-un’s missile test yesterday through a cyber-attack causing the rocket to spectacularly flop, according to a former British foreign secretary.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind claims American intelligence has used cyber warfare to successfully foil missile tests before and that there is a “strong belief” that President Trump’s administration was behind North Korea’s latest failed launch.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind claims the US could have sabotaged North Korea failed missile launch

Speaking with the BBC, he said: “It could have failed because the system is not competent enough to make it work, but there is a very strong belief that the US through cyber methods has been successful on several occasions in interrupting these sorts of tests and making them fail.”

(snip)

[proust]

will we ever know for sure?

[Morpheus2009]

Can we hack their missiles to detonate right in the silo or on the launch vehicle? That would be even better.

[Seruzawa]

Why would a missile be connected to the internet? Unless I’m missing something this sounds completely nuts. Though I could imagine Pentagon REMFs coming up with such a boneheaded idea. Not the NKs though.

[proust]

They could wind up nuking themselves.

[unixfox]

Sure it could have been from a cyber attack. Just as it could have been a dud.

[Montana_Sam]

It wouldn't have anything to do with the Internet. It could have been embedded in the microcode of the chips used in the rocket, such as the guidance system or fuel delivery system or another of whatever systems the rocket had. Lots of info on various cyber-warfare methodologies floating around. Here's a related story about Stuxnet, and how it might have been deployed against the Iranians. And Stuxnet is only one such system that is presently known.

[DoughtyOne]

The incitement by the press these days seems to be focused on starting an international showdown of some sort.

If this were true, what would be the benefit of declaring publicly what methods we used to defeat a madman dictator?

I don’t think any lives were lost here. If it were true that we caused the failure, wouldn’t it be the best possible preventative measure we could take?

Why would someone want to air it in public and give cause for North Korea to take preventative measures to defeat this tactic in the future?

That would result in us having to step up to some more overt way to prevent it. That would not be nearly as desirable.

Frankly, I’m not buying into the idea anyway.

[DesertRhino]

Baloney. This is just propaganda about how deeply effective the CIA wants to be seen as. Same as 24 or Homeland.

[Parley Baer]

You know their engineers will say it was a cyber attack in order to save their lives.

[WHBates]

will we ever know for sure?

If we do it would not have been that much of a success, I would think.

[VanShuyten]

I’m still goin with “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!”

[pa_dweller]

Possibly self-destruct due to (deliberately caused) loss of telemetry?

[Steely Tom]

This story — true or not — will almost certainly cause Fat Boy to undertake a huge counterattack, and to greatly beef up (heh heh) his cyber-offense cadres.

This is a good thing, because in order to be effective, his cyber warriors will absolutely have to be given wide, unrestricted access to the internet. There is no way they can keep up with the latest trends in cyber warfare, including the constantly improving defenses they will have to defeat, without being given free access to the entirety of the World Wide Web.

This in turn will have several effects, all of which are helpful to us.

1. The cyber warriors will learn things about the wider world that will shake their confidence in Fat Boy and in the world-view they've been fed from an early age
2. They will take their knowledge home to their families, and it will spread from there. If they can sneak out thumb drives, they can be copied and distributed rapidly; NK has a lively and effective black market for digital media. Today's high-capacity digital media offers incredibly dense storage.
3. Fat Boy will undoubtedly try to select his cyber warrior cadres from the most loyal ranks of society. NK uses a pervasive and draconian social classification system to organize workers into distinct categories. One big reason for this is to try to identify those who are genetically disposed to be loyal to the Kim family and to the state. I think we can assume that the members of the higher classes will not be the sharpest knives in the drawer, just as is the case among Western elites.
4. This, in turn, will mean that Fat Boy (or his successor) will be under pressure to allow the less-worthy but more intelligent classes into the cyber cadres, if only to bring enough IQ points in to be effective as cyber warriors.
5. As worldly knowledge sinks in to these cadres, they will undoubtedly become rebellious. This increases our attack surface for social engineering.
6. The more rebellious members of these cadres will turn their skills toward attacking their own government's cyber systems. Some of them will become superb espionage agents for us.

There is absolutely no way this dynamic can be circumvented or evaded. If Fat Boy wants effective cyber warriors, he has to select his smartest and most analytical young people to do the job, and he has to open up their access to the world over the WWW. That sets up a set of severe vulnerabilities for counter-action by us.

[LibWhacker]

[Cementjungle]

It could have been caused by a flock of angry seagulls too... who knows?

[Daniel Ramsey]

I don’t think so, i think Kimmy told them to blow it up, a successful failure.

[Tucker39]

Maybe this Brit is just flapping his jaws over a case of red butt when their cover was blown snooping on Trump, et al.

[Steely Tom]

Cute picture, but the PV arrays on that satellite would have to be a million times larger (in area) to produce the kind of power needed by such a weapon.

I’m not exaggerating. A million.

[Daniel Ramsey]

https://youtu.be/bx43FMO8wx4

The look on Kimmy’s face when he sees this coming!