14 DAY TRIAL // The members of the Bureau 121, the North Korean secret cyber division, have carried out their cyber operations from the city of Shenyang, China, for years and are believed to still conduct work from secret units in this location.
Kim Heung-Kwang, a computer science professor who defected from North Korea to the South in 2004, tells CNN that Bureau 121’s secret network was established in the late ‘90s in the Chinese city, but large-scale operations did not start until 2005.
Hackers have legitimate jobs as cover
Shenyang is close to the North Korean border and offers a better Internet infrastructure than the one available in the Hermit Kingdom. The defector thinks that hacking activities ordered by the government in Pyongyang are still run from this city.
Although North Korea has improved its Internet connectivity, most of its traffic is still run through China.
Heung-Kwang told CNN that the Bureau 121 hackers entered China in groups of 20 and had different titles in order to mask their true intentions. Some of them posed as office workers, while others as diplomatic staffers.
In an interview for Reuters, the professor says that the cover of one of his friends carrying out cyber operations for the North Korean government is that of an employee of a trading company; but no one knows what he actually does, as his firm conducts business as usual.
Shenyang has a large North Korean community
There are many North Korean businesses run in Shenyang, from restaurants to hotels and marketplaces. CNN discovered that women who work at these places are most of the times students at the same university in Pyongyang and came to China in “what is considered a prestigious three-year assignment.”
Recent information released by the Ministry of Defense in South Korea, reports that the cyber army of the North is currently 6,000 strong, a figure that is double than what the same office announced in 2013.
The hackers in Bureau 121 are assigned into smaller groups that have specific countries as targets, the US, South Korea and Japan being the main ones.
Before starting their task, they spend some time getting familiar with the language of the country they are deployed to in order to increase the rate of success for reaching their goal.