| Publicity: | The Olympics may have had most of the world glued to TVs right, but in South Korea millions wouldn’t bother blinking for a second beyond the action unfolding on their screens. For them, the only games going are bristling with powerful weaponry, require lightning fast trigger skills to survive and are played out on virtual battle grounds. |
|
|
| Internet gaming is a massive phenomenon in a country with saturation, super-fast internet and it’s got its superstars, big bucks and even its own top rating television shows. |
|
|
| It’s also got plenty of downside. |
|
|
| The number of players addicted to gaming is estimated in the millions. So-called PC Bangs in places like the capital Seoul are filled with gamers who don’t know what time of the day or night it is and who have been playing for days on end. A number of murders and deaths have been assigned to the gaming obsession. Special psychiatric units have been established to deal with the problem. |
|
|
| And while a generation binges on net-games, a very real enemy is watching and looking for vulnerabilities in the national grid. |
|
|
| Foreign Correspondent has tracked down key defectors with first-hand knowledge of North Korea’s clandestine cyber operations. They’ve provided intimate detail of a crack team of tech whizzes training their sights on South Korea’s computer grid, planting viruses and dislocating and disabling important parts of the system – the financial sector, transport, internet service providers and portals. |
|
|
| It’s a disturbing picture but it doesn’t end in the tense arm wrestle on the peninsula. North Korea has a wider horizon. |
|
|
| As one high ranking defector tells North Asia Correspondent Mark Willacy: |
|
|
| “To countries …there is a high possibility that North Korea can infiltrate using other ways other than as North Korean defectors. They can launder their identity. Such people can easily enter (countries) and do business and carry out their job.” JANG SE-YUL – former North Korean colonel |
|
| Gamers on TV show | Music | 00:00 |
|
| WILLACY: These are South Korea’s cyber warriors and they’re battling it out live on one of the nation’s top rating TV shows. | 00:12 |
|
| Music | 00:23 |
|
| WILLACY: Don’t bother mentioning the Olympics here, high speed and online are the only games that count. They’re played and followed by tens of millions of South Koreans. It’s a national obsession fired by the fastest and most pervasive internet on earth – 90% of homes have broadband connections. | 00:32 |
|
| Music | 00:54 |
| Seoul streets. Night | WILLACY: But a mighty online army and thundering web power is also proving to be a major weakness. Tonight the dark side of South Korea’s flashy cyber culture. We’ll meet its hapless addicts, assess its death toll and explore how it’s become the new and very real battle ground with North Korea. And despite the impressive firepower, it’s a war the South may be losing. | 00:57 |
| Prof. Kim Huy-Kang | PROFESSOR KIM HUY-KANG: “The fairly advanced level of North Korea’s cyber-attack capability has been discovered through analysis not only by the Korean Intelligence Agency but also by the CIA”. | 01:25 |
| Seoul streets. Night | WILLACY: This is a story of defectors, double agents, contract hits and how a global pariah better known for oppression, deprivation and blackouts is hacking and subverting its super-sophisticated neighbour. First, the fun. | 01:40 |
| ESports game – League of Legends | For millions of South Koreans, this is their Friday night football. This is the top league of E Sports, a competition of professional teams going head to head on national cable TV and it rates. | 02:06 |
|
| The top gamers are national heroes, revered and rewarded in equal measure. | 02:30 |
|
| CHUN YONG-JOON: “The top players are paid an annual salary of more than $170,000 at the age of just 18 or 19. | 02:38 |
| Chun Yong-Joon | Apart from that they can appear on commercials or hold events such as meeting fans for autograph sessions”. | 02:45 |
| Willacy watching games with Lim Yo-Hwan | WILLACY: I’ve been invited into this computerised mayhem by the country’s number one gladiator Lim Yo-Hwan. | 02:55 |
|
| LIM YO-HWAN: “I feel great to be loved by so many people. | 03:03 |
| Lim Yo-Hwan | If you’re a pro you don’t desire to be the top, but you desire to be the strongest”. | 03:08 |
| Lim Yo-Hwan at terminal | CHUN YONG-JOON: “He is the equivalent to Michael Jordan in basketball and Tiger Woods in golf. | 03:19 |
| Chun Yong-Joon | So I view him not just as a player but as a pioneer… as a hero”. | 03:25 |
| Lim Yo-Hwan appearances montage | Music | 03:32 |
|
| WILLACY: Lim Yo-Hwan has appeared in movies, as well as commercials for many of South Korea’s top brands. He has an official fan club of more than a million members, and has been recognised as the greatest gamer of all time by a leading E Sports website. | 03:34 |
| Lim Ho-Hwan | LIM HO-HWAN: “The best thing is doing what I love while making money and having lots of supporters. The better I perform the more love I will get from the public”. | 03:51 |
| Kim Ga Yeon and Lim with dog at team practice. | WILLACY: His partner is almost as famous on a different screen. Kim Ga Yeon is one of South Korea’s best known movie stars. Together they’re one of the country’s most glamorous and most photographed couples. She’s come along to Lim’s team practice. Just like professional athletes, it takes years of sweat to make it to this level. Practice is unrelenting. | 04:06 |
|
| LIM HO-HWAN: “More than 10 hours a day – and if I practise more it can be 13 to 15 hours. | 04:33 |
| Lim | I have been able to play for a period of 13 years only because I loved the game more than anyone”. | 04:39 |
| Gamers at monitors/Game on screen | WILLACY: But only a few make it to the top – many more are languishing at the bottom of a pit of addiction and desperation. | 04:51 |
| Seoul streets. Gaming parlours. Night. | Music | 05:00 |
|
| WILLACY: You don’t have to go far to find them. Follow the signs to Seoul’s so-called PC Bangs. Inside these internet gaming parlours, it’s hard to know what day it is and that’s exactly how operators make their money and how gamers like electrician Jin-il, get hooked. | 05:05 |
| Jin-il playing game in parlour | JIN-IL: “Two days. It’s been two days”. WILLACY: He’s entering his third straight uninterrupted day in front of the screen - | 05:27 |
| Game on screen | despite the fact he should be at work. | 05:34 |
| Jin-il | JIN-IL: “Frankly speaking, I think I’m an addict too. I know I have to quit gaming for the sake of my own life. But I cannot quit”. | 05:38 |
| Jin-il playing game in parlour | WILLACY: Jin-Il is just one of a legion lost to their obsession. An estimated two million gamers including a quarter of all teens, don’t know when to pull the plug. DR LEE JAE-WON: “There are patients hospitalised in our clinic | 05:52 |
| Dr Lee | who were in a PC Bang for five days, or even a week”. | 06:11 |
| Exterior. Gongju hospital | Music | 06:14 |
|
| WILLACY: This is the Gongju National Hospital just south of Seoul. | 06:24 |
| Dr Lee with patient | Here Doctor Lee Jae-Won runs the “Save Brain” clinic, a psychiatric unit that treats internet addiction. Many of his patients, like this boy receiving so-called ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation’ are barely in their teens. | 06:30 |
| Transcranial magnetic stimulation machine | According to Dr Lee this treatment stimulates the parts of the brain that have been sidelined by marathon computer game play. | 06:52 |
| Dr Lee | DR LEE JAE-WON: “Sitting in a chair for a long period of time | 07:01 |
| Dr Lee with boy patient | can lead to slipped discs or the formation of blood clots causing damage to other organs. So there are definitely health risks which can result in death in extreme cases”. WILLACY: This boy is just 11 years old. He’s undergoing a series of tests to determine how his | 07:08 |
|
| obsessive game play has affected brain function. Doctor Lee worries that excessive exposure can blur the line between fantasy and reality. DR LEE JAE-WON: “For example, if someone plays a particularly violent game – one that involves killing people – for 24 hours… 48 hours… or even longer, | 07:36 |
| Dr Lee | then in that person’s head those actions related to shooting or killing people can become acceptable and natural”. | 07:59 |
| News reports | WILLACY: South Korean authorities have already attributed more than a dozen real life killings to online addiction and in recent times, South Korea has been shocked by a series of other deaths blamed on internet addiction, none more heart wrenching than the case of the three month old baby girl who was left to die. | 08:10 |
| Dr Sukhi | DR SUKHI CHAI: “The parents became addicted to games and neglected their parenting duties so the baby starved to death”. | 08:34 |
| Dr Sukhi at computer looking at game | Music | 08:45 |
|
| WILLACY: Clinical psychologist Sukhi Chai was asked by the court to assess the mother. She found that while the mother was starving her real baby at home, she was nurturing a virtual online child at a PC Bang nearby. | 08:50 |
|
| DR SUKHI CHAI: “There appears to have been some confusion with fantasy and reality. | 09:07 |
| Dr Sukhi | They cannot control their behaviour and their ability to judge stops functioning”. | 09:17 |
| Dr Sukhi at computer | WILLACY: The case created a national furore. The mother was spared gaol because she was pregnant and despite Dr Chai’s recommendation to the court that she be treated and monitored, the woman has disappeared. | 09:27 |
| Dr Sukhi | DR SUKHI CHAI: “With addiction there’s always a high chance of relapse so I’m worried the new baby will be neglected and it will not grow up healthy”. | 09:41 |
| Gamers at machines | Music | 09:54 |
|
| WILLACY: In another recent case a woman was arrested after giving birth in the bathroom of PC Bang, then sealing the newborn in a plastic bag and dumping it in a bin in the parking lot where the baby died. | 09:59 |
|
| They’re the stories that shock but they haven’t slowed the rampant growth of gaming one little bit. South Korea is proud it leads the world with web power and that it leaves its Northern neighbour well and truly in the dark. | 10:15 |
| Seoul traffic. Night |
| 10:32 |
| Willacy on street to camera | WILLACY: “All along this busy stretch of road in the capital Seoul, a novelty – 21 so-called media poles. They all provide free public access to the internet. They’re a city curiosity, a talking point for tourists, but they’re also a very visible reminder of how South Korea has enthusiastically embraced the high speed internet. | 10:40 |
| Willacy using media pole | You can even email your photo to anyone anywhere in the world except North Korea”. | 11:01 |
| North Korea pics/computer screens | Music | 11:08 |
|
| WILLACY: The technological differences between the two enemies are stark. We know the North is busily trying to turn itself into a nuclear warrior, but it’s also been busy at work on another secret program. It’s developed a surprisingly sophisticated capacity to infiltrate South Korea’s computer networks. | 11:14 |
|
| PARK SANG-HAK: “For cyber terror and special computer activities | 11:36 |
| Park Sang-Hak | the regime has trained about three thousand experts. | 11:40 |
| Jang Se-Yul | JANG SE-YUL: “They select the most outstanding ones and engage them in professional development of software and those people are what people here call “soldiers of cyber terror war”. | 11:45 |
| Defectors stage mock execution | WILLACY: On the streets of Seoul a group of North Korean defectors called the People’s Liberation front are staging a mock execution of their former leader. | 12:06 |
|
| JANG SE-YUL: “We North Korean defectors harbour a lot of resentment towards Kim Jong-un. | 12:29 |
| Jang Se-Yul | He turned out to be more vicious than his father. | 12:35 |
| Defectors stage mock execution | WILLACY: They’re led by Jang Se-Yul, a former North Korean colonel who witnessed the extreme corruption and cruelty of the Kim cult. | 12:43 |
|
| He’s haunted by dreadful memories, most notable the horror of the North Korean famine of the 1990’s when he led a night patrol | 12:56 |
| Archival. North Korea famine pics | picking up the bodies of those who starved in the streets. JANG SE-YUL: “Our team was made up of six people – four members and two police officers – and we collected about two hundred bodies over a period of four months. But we couldn’t do anything about it. | 13:04 |
| Jang Se-Yul | That was the most heart-breaking and deplorable thing”. | 13:27 |
| Mock execution | WILLACY: But when he wasn’t mopping up the regime’s dirty work, he was a crack member of its cyber warfare unit. | 13:35 |
|
| JANG SE-YUL: “From the early 1980s the nation selected the brightest people and professionally trained them. Information agents were sent overseas to enemy countries like America and South Korea. | 13:43 |
| Jang Se-Yul | They went overseas as professionals and actually studied there and infiltrated computer-related companies as employees. Based on the information they collected they developed programs for hacking, destroying or infecting with viruses”. | 14:02 |
| Seoul. Night | Music | 14:24 |
|
| WILLACY: That strategy is why Pyongyang is considered responsible for a crippling hit on a major South Korean bank. | 14:31 |
| Bank building | The hacking last year of the Nonghyup Bank left 30 million customers unable to access their bank accounts for more than a week. The bank then had to spend 400 million dollars upgrading its cyber security. | 14:38 |
| Jang Se-Yul | JANG SE-YUL: “My friends, who were experts in the cyber field, often said attacking the network systems of banks or financial companies instead of military or government agencies would paralyse the whole nation and its people within a second. That’s why penetrating the bank’s network was the biggest blow”. | 14:54 |
| Buildings/Neons | WILLACY: Then this year, it’s believed the North was behind several other attacks including the hacking of a conservative newspaper in Seoul and an attempt to plant a virus in the system of Incheon International Airport. | 15:30 |
|
| KIM HUNG-KWANG: “From 2000, they began targeting South Korea in earnest attacking many targets and accumulating much experience in the process”. | 15:49 |
| Kim Hung-Kwang in office at computer | WILLACY: Kim Hung-Kwang was one of the architects of North Korea’s cyber warfare program. For nearly 20 years the computer science professor taught hacker recruits at the prestigious Hamheung Computer College in Pyongyang. | 15:55 |
| Kim Hung-Kwang | KIM HUNG-KWANG: “I’ve taught many students, many of whom went on to become cyber troops. Missiles are dangerous as weapons of mass destruction – but cyber terror can inflict just as much damage”. | 16:11 |
| Computer graphics show cyber attacks | WILLACY: This defector says the North’s strategy is not just about targeting the financial system, it’s also about spreading dysfunction and mayhem throughout the capitalist South. | 16:37 |
| Cyber attack ‘montage’ | KIM HUNG-KWANG: “If a cyber-attack crashes computer servers of certain banks or important national infrastructures such as energy, water supply, nuclear power plants and air traffic control then | 16:49 |
| Kim Hung-Kwang | there’ll be no drinkable water, nuclear power plants will explode and aeroplanes will crash into each other in the sky. The damage could be massive”. WILLACY: In official circles | 17:09 |
| Willacy to camera | here in Seoul, the claim that the North is developing an increasingly sophisticated hacking capability is met with both sensitivity and secrecy. Foreign Correspondent formally requested interviews with the Unification and Defence Ministries, the National Police Agency and the National Intelligence Service. None agreed to be interviewed. | 17:28 |
| Korea University War Room |
| 17:53 |
| Interior of War Room | But we were allowed into one of their cyber war rooms. Here at the University of Korea under the tutelage of Professor Kim Huy-Kang, computer nerds are being trained for the cyber trenches. | 17:57 |
| Prof Kim Huy-Kang | PROFESSOR KIM HUY-KANG: “What we teach is the skill to detect an attack and we especially focus on the skills to detect unknown attacks. Of course, the student will be taught how to respond to those kinds of attacks”. | 18:10 |
| Interior of War Room | WILLACY: Professor Kim has studied the North’s cyber strikes and he sees a dangerous pattern emerging. PROFESSOR KIM HUY-KANG: “They targeted government sites, web homepages of mass media companies, and the major portal sites like the counterpart of Yahoo in Korea. Those were the websites most Koreans visit daily and most of them were down. | 18:28 |
| Prof Kim Huy-Kang | So the damage was massive and it was so difficult to track them down”. | 18:54 |
| Gas being pumped into balloons | WILLACY: While some on the South Korean grid are developing high tech defences to protect themselves, others are going well analogue in their campaign against the Kim regime. | 19:00 |
| Park Sang-Hak | PARK SANG-HAK: “Since the regime closed off every possible route of outside information we can only make use of natural means”. | 19:15 |
| Balloons with anti-regime leaflets | WILLACY: Park Sang-Hak is number one on Pyongyang’s hit list. The son of a North Korean spy who defected, he also knows a great deal about the Kim regime’s cyber warfare program. He can’t use the World Wide Web to reach his compatriots over the border, so he’s using helium filled balloons to carry millions of anti-regime leaflets into a closed world. | 19:25 |
| Park Sang-Hak addressing crowd helping to release balloons | PARK SANG-HAK: “I hope these propaganda leaflets today will send a glimmer of hope and freedom to 20 million North Korean brothers in hunger and oppression under this dictatorship”. | 19:53 |
| Park Sang-Hak in car |
| 20:09 |
|
| WILLACY: Park Sang-Hak is haunted by scenes he can’t shake from his memory growing up in the North, including the public | 20:15 |
| Archival. North Korea executions | executions of hungry people caught stealing food during the famine. PARK SANG-HAK: “They forced the children to watch those executions - the prisoners’ chest busting apart and blood spraying everywhere – | 20:22 |
| Park Sang-Hak | when they were shot from just 20 or 30 metres away. It was to create an atmosphere of extreme terror”. | 20:35 |
| Park Sang-Hak talks with reporters during balloon release | WILLACY: His activities since defecting have enraged the Kim regime. | 20:45 |
| Park Sang-Hak | PARK SANG-HAK: “It was October 2008 when the regime first said they’d kill me. They called me directly on my mobile phone”. | 20:51 |
| Re-enactment. Phone call | WILLACY: And last year Pyongyang acted on its threat activating a sleeper agent. | 20:01 |
| Interior. Train carriage | The assassin proved to be someone Park Sang-Hak knew and would never suspect, a defector called Ahn Yeong-Gil. | 21:09 |
| Subway/Phone call | PARK SANG-HAK: “While he wasn’t like other defectors at all I didn’t think he might be a spy. For five or six years I didn’t hear from him – then out of nowhere he called me in February last year. He wanted to meet”. WILLACY: This is where Ahn wanted to meet Park, in the Seoul subway but on the day of their rendezvous, | 21:17 |
|
| Park got another call from the National Intelligence Service who’d been tipped off about the assassination plot. | 21:43 |
|
| PARK SANG-HAK: “They told me not to go to the meeting place. | 21:52 |
| Park Sang-Hak | And when the NIS apprehended him on site they found poison needles, a poison gun disguised as a flashlight, and three poison vials on him”. | 21:56 |
| News report on assassination attempt | WILLACY: The foiled assassination attempt led national news bulletins. The gadgets sound like they’re straight out of a 1960s James Bond movie, but as the police later demonstrated, these poisoned bullets and darts could have easily killed Park Sang-Hak. So this son of a North Korean spy was very nearly assassinated by another of Pyongyang’s secret agents and the threat hasn’t gone away. | 22:10 |
| Defectors at North Korean Freedom week event | [Singing] | 22:41 |
|
| WILLACY: It’s North Korean Freedom Week in Seoul. All the big identities in the defector community are here, including Park Sang-Hak and former-cyber soldiers Jang Se-Yul and Kim Hung-Kwang. In Pyongyang they’re traitors, here they’re heroes. | 22:49 |
| North Korea video excerpt | Music | 23:08 |
| Audience watch video | WILLACY: The audience is shown a video of the horrors of their homeland. To these people they’re not far away images, but painful reminders of what they’ve lived through. | 23:17 |
| North Korea video excerpt | Music | 23:28 |
| Kim Hung-Kwang | KIM HUNG-KWANG: “I felt so much pity for my poor brethren and wondered why we must endure this”. | 23:36 |
| Jang addresses Freedom Week participants | WILLACY: They all feel deeply about the plight of their fellow North Koreans but they’re also very worried about the ambitions of the new leader. These former insiders all agree, North Korea’s sights range wider than its immediate neighbourhood. | 23:46 |
| Jang Se-Yul | JANG SE-YUL: “To countries including Australia, there’s a high possibility that North Korea can infiltrate using ways other than defectors. They can launder their identity. Such people can easily enter Australia and do business and carry out their job. To North Koreans, Australia is regarded the same as America”. | 24:16 |
|
| PARK SANG-HAK: “The regime was preparing for cyber warfare before I left North Korea starting as early as the 1980s. | 24:48 |
| Park Sang-Hak | Even as early as that the regime foresaw that in the future war will be fought electronically in cyber space rather than with conventional weapons”. | 24:54 |
| Gaming montage | WILLACY: Every day, in millions of private homes and internet parlours across South Korea, cyber wars are won and lost. The country’s all-pervasive internet is proving to be both a blessing and a curse, fuelling its powerhouse economy while trapping its young in addictive fantasy worlds. So the South’s very strength, its interconnected and wired society, could turn out to be its greatest weakness. | 25:04 |