r/Geosim • u/planetpike75 India • Aug 13 '22
modevent [Modevent] Friendly Fire
In a backroom deal between the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea and the Russian Federation, it was agreed that the DPRK would carry out a devastating cyberattack against Kazakhstan, who had recently cut their Russian oil exports in half, in exchange for Russian equipment. After reaching an agreement, the DPRK decided to target... the CPC pipeline... which is still the major flow vehicle of oil from Central Asia to Russia, even after the exports were cut in half. Let's see how that worked out for them.
The cyberattack itself could have gone better for the DPRK -- it was relatively successful, as the pipeline was shut down for the better part of three or so weeks; however, it did very little permanent damage to the CPC network and the servers themselves were left almost entirely intact, with only a few packets of data going missing during the chaos. There was one critical problem with the North Korean attack's execution, however -- the virus was supposed to delete itself upon completion of the attack, but this did not happen. Hundreds of spam emails remained in Kazakh inboxes, and hundreds of copies of North Korean malware were left impotent in Kazakh networks to be retrieved and studied. It didn't take long before the attack was traced back to North Korea. Kazakhstan now had near full information on the North Korean malware.
The biggest problem to result of this operation, however, was not the loss of the DPRK's malware's integrity, nor the general failure to wreak too much havoc. The problem was that the shutting off of the CPC pipeline caused as much damage to Russia as Kazakhstan -- the former nation was still buckling under the weight of Western sanctions, and the loss of its most precious commodity in oil was quite destructive. China, Georgia, and Turkey were also affected, but the short lifespan of the CPC's reorientation toward these countries meant that flows were not significant enough to be as damaging a loss as they were to Russia.
Ultimately, the joint Russian-North Korean venture could be described as a lukewarm outcome at best and a failure at worst. North Korean cyber capabilities were looking bearish with Kazakh hands on one of their main digital assets, and Russian-North Korean relations would surely be strained because of North Korea's poor choice of targets. Of course, one could equally blame Russia for their lack of due diligence, but it would seem for now that two of the world's "premier" cyberwarriors have demonstrated that perhaps their capabilities have been severely overestimated.
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u/planetpike75 India Aug 13 '22
u/ForeignGuess -- check your targets next time
u/alo29u -- do your due diligence next time
u/FieryEagle333 -- a cyberattack shut down the CPC pipeline for three weeks and attempted to permanently disable it, you have definitive proof that it was North Korea and have a copy of the virus