Sony Pictures Entertainment is reeling
from what may be the biggest
and most devastating computer hacking
in Hollywood's history.
Hackers attacked in waves.
First, crippling Sony's internal systems,
then leaking five Sony movies online.
Today, the U.S. government
pointed the finger of blame directly at North Korea
for the devastating cyber attack against Sony Pictures.
Sony pulling the plug on the interview,
saying it will not show the controversial comedy
about an assassination attempt on North Korea's leader.
The Sony Pictures hacking was taken very seriously
because it was an attack on the free world.
What we had been building,
in terms of our civilization and our freedom
and our ability to exchange information freely
had been disrupted
by a country that we knew very little about.
North Korea has reportedly made attempts
to steal Covid-19 vaccine technology
by hacking pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.
The Justice Department has charged
three North Korean hackers
over a wide-ranging scheme that included the attempt theft
of billions of dollars from multiple companies.
Despite so many attacks blamed on North Korea,
there was not much known
about the people behind the hacking attacks.
And my aim was to reveal who these people are,
what they are like, what their operations are like
and on what their dreams and fears were.
My name is Sam Kim.
I'm a reporter for Bloomberg News,
and I wrote a story for Businessweek
about North Korean hackers.
My story is about people who are sent from North Korea
to countries like China to hack for the regime,
spy on enemies
and make money.
North Korea's cyber abilities began about in the 1970s
with a lot of students going to countries
like Russia, China and even East Germany to learn coding.
It was aimed at improving the productivity
of factories at home.
But in some time in the 1980s and 1990s,
the current leader Kim Jong Un's father, Kim Jong Il,
thought that it would be a good idea to develop a team,
an army of people who could hack for North Korea's military.
So they began this team
of basically hackers,
who would spy for the North Korean regime
and also go out there and make hard currency for the regime.
I think Kim Jong Un takes the hacking ability more seriously
than his father.
He also enjoys a bit of tech savviness as well.
You know, he's often shown traveling on his airplane,
where on the desk, there's a Mac computer.
He understands the importance of computers.
He understands the importance of employing technology
to improve productivity of his economy.
North Korea is an isolated country
with its economy pretty much dilapidated nowadays.
It's been under increasing pressure and sanctions
from the U.S. and the international community basically.
It does not have the resources and money
to build the kind of conventional weapons
that other countries are able to build.
So what happens is North Korea concentrates
its resources on building nuclear arms and missiles,
which experts call basically asymmetric weapons.
It's the kind of weapons that gives North Korea
an instant edge.
Think of cyber-hacking abilities
in that context. It doesn't cost them much money.
But if you have the right people,
and if you have the right training,
you are able to cultivate an army of people who are able
to penetrate into computer systems of other countries.
And that's what North Korea is after.
But if you consider the fact that there are only
about 1,000 IP addresses in North Korea available,
and many of them are basically loaned
from Chinese communications companies,
you can kind of tell why North Korea is willing to
send its hackers abroad rather than operate from within.
What's the matter with operating from within?
Well,
first of all, it would mean that a lot of information
would have to be coming in from the outside world,
which could risk exposing the government
and the people to whatever truth there might be about them.
So there they're sending their trained hackers to China
and other countries where access to information is better.
But at the same time, because these are allies,
and also because they have their diplomat station
in countries like these, like China,
they're able to regulate and control these hackers better.
But formally, North Korea denies engaging
in hacking and describes accusations
to that effect as enemy propaganda.
It took me at least half a year
to track down these people.
It felt like a wild goose chase in the beginning
because, see, a lot of the people like these
are protected by the government in South Korea.
But at the end,
I was able to find a person who had pretty extensive ties
to the North Korean-defected community here.
And then, I was also able to gain access
to the people who had actually done programming hacking
for North Korea before coming to South Korea.
And Jong is one of them.
Jong actually is not a real name.
I knew before meeting Jong that he was in his late 30s.
But when I actually met him,
he looked at least a decade older.
He wouldn't open up.
I mean, it took me, I think
at least an hour to make sure that he would trust me enough
that he would share with me his life story.
When he was first sent to China,
he was a student studying computer science at a university
near the border with North Korea.
And he came back and realized that there was a lot more
to do in China because he had more access to information,
and he asked that he'd be sent back to China.
And there was also recruitment going on
for people who would actually do coding officially,
but really hacking for North Korea.
So, he applied and he got the job.
Once he got to the border, he crossed by foot.
And from there, he took a bus.
And then when he arrived at the station
that he would spend years in later,
he learned that that three-story building
in the heart of the city was actually provided
for free actually by a Chinese man
who had business ties in North Korea.
There were actually two other people that I had met.
They all said that they go into this freelance website for
programmers, and clients from around the world would come
and give them orders, give them jobs to do.
Some of the jobs given to Jong were cracking open
commercially successful antivirus programs.
And once he was able to open that up,
he replicated that program into another product,
which his client would repackage
as a whole different product to be sold to other people.
He also created what we now call bots.
There are very popular online games,
including Lineage.
He would create a bot that would just roam around
without any supervision from the user
and basically trade items with other users on that game.
He would grow that bot on Lineage,
and sell it for almost $100.
Another defector said the money from clients was
wired primarily via PayPal to accounts controlled by minders
because they were the only ones with access
to legitimate bank accounts.
Jong had to make at least $100,000 a year,
and he doesn't get to keep most of it.
Actually, most of the money goes to minders,
to the North Korean regime.
But if you don't meet the quota,
the minders will make sure
that they'll put enough pressure on you.
And if that happens repeatedly,
you will face the growing odds of being sent back home.
Among the three people that I spoke to,
there's a common thing that they all tell me,
which is that on every Saturday,
they have to do this propaganda session,
which is basically about gathering
all of the hackers together
into a room, and they have to recite whatever messages,
whatever lines come from Pyongyang,
about the Kim family, about socialism.
If you're especially someone with a free set of mind,
that's stressful.
One person actually was really stressed out.
What he heard about North Korea
once he was in China during the propaganda sessions,
he's just couldn't take it.
Jong was a senior member of the unit that he belonged to,
and he was good at Chinese as well.
Whenever the senior North Korean official came
from North Korea to check on the hacking units in China,
Jong would accompany that official.
He doesn't provide me details,
but he calls it "unsavory incident" that happened
between him and an official that he was traveling with.
And that altercation prompted him
to defect.
But there was no one that he could turn to after defecting.
He would in disguise roam around China.
He told me that he actually enjoyed it.
He actually enjoyed the freedom of, you know,
not being known to anybody,
just roaming around a country that was huge.
How did he make the money that he needed to carry on?
He did the same thing he did, you know,
at the North Korean unit.
He would take orders.
He would reverse engineer software to make money.
But at one point, he said he was just sick and tired of it
all of a sudden.
It just, he wanted to find a place
where he could just settle down.
And he contacted South Korean authorities.
Now, he lives in Korea.
He met a woman here.
You know, last time I checked, they had a baby.
He worked for a software company,
ironically an antivirus company.
What keeps coming up in my head,
even long after I spoke to these people,
is there was one common thing about them,
which was the sense of disillusionment.
Once they had access to outside information,
once they were able to freely roam in the internet,
there was a spark.
And once they realized that there's a discrepancy
between what they think is really happening
and what North Korea is telling them every Saturday morning,
that's when the spark gets bigger.
That little fire is what eventually drives them
to decide to leave.
Even if it takes a huge risk on their lives.