Electronic Blades in the Dark - North Korea's "Dark Soul" Attack and the Evolution of Cyber Strategy (2013)

Electronic Blades in the Dark - North Korea's "Dark Soul" Attack and the Evolution of Cyber Strategy (2013)

In 2013, North Korea launched a massive cyberattack targeting South Korean banks and broadcasters. The operation, dubbed "Dark Seoul" by the public, crippled thousands of computers simultaneously, shutting down financial transactions and media broadcasts. The existence of this new weapon, which paralyzed society without the fire of battle, shook the world.

In the historical background, the Korean Peninsula was in the midst of tension, with nuclear tests and long-range missile launches forced immediately after the inauguration of the Kim Jong-un regime. In South Korea, the Park Geun-hye administration had just come to power, and military confrontations were on the rise against the backdrop of joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises. Under these circumstances, North Korea chose cyber-attacks as an asymmetric force to compensate for its inferior conventional military capabilities.

On the technical side, malware was used to infiltrate the organization's internal network and destroy the master boot record (MBR) to disable the system again. This was very similar to "sabotage" in military operations in that it not only erased data, but also made recovery difficult by destroying the system infrastructure. In addition, the structure of simultaneous and multiple attacks via command servers was the prototype for later large-scale ransomware and destructive attacks.

The "Dark Soul" attack is believed to have involved North Korea's cyber unit, the 121st Bureau, and became a symbolic incident that showed the country's development of cyber weapons as part of its national strategy. This was followed by the Sony Pictures attack in 2014, which made clear that North Korea was taking on the international community not with conventional fire but with "electronic blades. Cyberspace, no longer a battlefield without shadows, has become a new arena for rewriting the post-Cold War security picture.