U.S. blames North Korea for 'WannaCry' cyber attack
reuters.com
reuters.com
I'm not saying it's not NK,just that there are plenty of well funded large scale advanced blackhat organizations (e.g. - Dridex). It's also known that NK has foreign offices in China and elsewhere. Russians recruit hackers for their APT work and in exchange let the hackers do whatever they want,why not NK hackers?
If you were a NK hacker in china,wouldn't it cross your mind to weaponize a treasure trove of NSA tools into a profitable ransomware? Code similarities with lazarus group tools can be explained by this and other similar plausible theories.
NK is low on cash so it could have been a pyongyang directive. But the whole operation lacks a lot of the operational and organizational details a typical APT operation would exhibit. A kill switch but no whitelist to avoid annoying allies. when kill switch was discovered I would expect a nation state operation to quickly adopt. Nation states love hoarding strategic compromises (typically websites,botnets,etc...) As far as I know,no pre-existing botnet or compromised sites took part in catalyzing the worm.
Again,not saying it's not NK,I'm just saying a few too many things seem off, I take this attribution with a few grains of salt.
But you're right, attribution here is dangerous unless they have some solid evidence.
nobody ever accused nk of being elite. it would be frankly much more surprising if their cyber programs were on par with china or russia.
All in all a pretty good response on Obama's part; it didn't demand immediate visible action but preserved freedom of maneuver; later, if a US cyberattack had come to light, it would have been a sort of chit that could have been redeemed by way of justification.
As someone else here has noted, it is impressive what DPRK has put together with comparatively limited resources. It makes me wonder what the cyber-landscape is going to look like in the coming years as the U.S. continues to ostracize the already scarce few who actually know how to reverse engineer malware, AND have the ethics to properly report it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/96...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/15/15643226/wannacry-ransomw...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/15/wannacry-...
There is nothing conclusive there though
If this is not the most convenient way to justify going to war with North Korea then I don’t know what is. It is almost as if the hackers WANTED to get caught by reusing code that was previously used in an attack initiated by North Korea.
Also we shouldn’t forget that it was an exploit developed by the NSA to begin with.
Weapons of Mass Destruction anyone?
[1] http://www.itv.com/news/2017-10-13/hacking-threat-is-as-seri...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/27/uk-north-korea-behind-wannac...
That did not stop the UK from going ahead with their bit in the Gulf War. If a war is to be had evidence doesn't really matter. It could be fabricated far easier than you could have real evidence, history has quite a few examples.
Given the current political climate in the UK I would not put it past them to start making stuff up, a distraction from internal strife is always a good reason to start a war.
Microsoft - I hope - is another matter.
The reason why - at least, to me - there is little point to either the UK or the US wanting to start a war with NK is that unlike Iraq NK actually has a good chance of inflicting massive damage on an ally. Plus the lottery ticket of Kim being able to lob a nuke halfway across the globe and make it stick even if attacked might be another item that gives pause to the powers that be.
So, whether NK is behind these attacks or not is absent very solid proof an open question, whether or not the government is laying the grounds for war hardly matters, those are not necessarily connected, though they could be it would be a first to go to a shooting war with a nation state over a cyber attack.
A lot of evidence points to the official US entry into the shooting war in Vietnam after what appeared to be totally fictional attacks on the US Navy - because the president did not want to appear to be weak.
The other thing is the act of congress enabling the President to authorize force after 9/11 is almost unconditional if he/she just says terrorism. We should have rescinded that after Osama bin Ladin was killed.
The second trip was from 5 June 2003 to 11 June 2003 when Kelly went to view and photograph two alleged mobile weapons laboratories as a part of a third inspection team. Kelly was unhappy with the description of the trailers and spoke off the record to The Observer, which, on 15 June 2003, quoted "a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq." The expert said:
They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories.
You could not use them for making biological weapons.
They do not even look like them. They are exactly what
the Iraqis said they were – facilities for the
production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)
See also: the 45 minute claim.
No, the WMD claim by the US was not an honest mistake, it was a purposeful lie to be used as an excuse for war.
Here is a speech by GWB on Iraq in 2002: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/07/usa.iraq
The claim was that Iraq threatened USA. At the time, everybody knew this was a lie. Iraq did not have capable missiles to reach US territory and claims that it had a secret nuclear program were extremely dubious. Remember : the fear was nuclear ICBM, this is what was hammered in the media. They fell back to chemical weapons, but if the US plans to invade every country with a stock of chemical weapons, good fucking luck!
Colin Powell, presenting the threats to the UN council, put forward a nuclear threat. He used as proofs, documents that were fake. "Obvious fake" as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency would call them: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq.documents/
What he said about it: "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
These were not mistakes, these were lies: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-schwarz/colin-powell...
Iraq was (correctly it appears, in hindsight) fearing an invasion so it was worried that opening up to foreign inspectors would lead to espionage to prepare the invading forces.
In the end, as a last hope to preserve peace, it allowed inspectors in a mission, led by Hans Blix. Here is how he described the cooperation of Iraqi forces:
"Iraq has on the whole cooperated rather well so far with Unmovic in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and with one exception it has been prompt. We have further had great help in building up the infrastructure of our office in Baghdad and the field office in Mosul. Arrangements and services for our plane and our helicopters have been good. The environment has been workable."
> If I believed any conspiracy as far as Iraq goes
US disregarded that and still decided to invade. No one had a single doubt that this was about oil.
Iraq is a clear case of a conspiracy. This is actually a very good counter-point to conspiracy theorists: When a government tries to lie about something, it is really obvious, and it still works.
> US disregarded that and still decided to invade. No one had a single doubt that this was about oil.
I remember that being what everyone cried in opposition to the war with Iraq but I never understood it. How did oil factor into the war?
The Bush Adm. had its eyes on Iraq pre-9/11. It's mostly forgotten now, but there were Tomahawk cruise missile attacks on Iraq in the summer of 2001. I remember discussing it and even noted in a journal entry that summer that it looked like G.W.B. wanted to go back and finish G.H.W.B.'s job.
It was not as straightforward as just oil. I think that eventually history will settle on it being a more complex set of factors, some of which boiled down to personal animosity by the President, and a feeling that Hussein had been given a free pass by the US in 1991 and was using it to thumb his nose at the West and, in doing so, was in a position to build up power and status within the region on the basis of having "survived" a US-led invasion and deposition attempt. To conservative hawks, his continued existence was a reminder of US failure and impotence, which didn't fit with the US's unipolar, pax Americana / "hyperpower" ambitions at the time. It wasn't a war for territory as much as it was a very public execution (or, politely, "regime change"), pour encourager les autres.
Hussein was a dead man, in retrospect, when G.W.B. got elected; it just took the administration a while to figure out how to get the war they'd wanted from the beginning out of the post-9/11 environment. Absent 9/11, if you look at what was going on during the early months of the G.W. Bush presidency, they would probably have found a way to push Hussein into giving them a casus belli anyway (it's not like Saddam was the most level-headed dictator; given the resources of the entire State Department, one can safely assume the US would have come up with a way of making him overreach, and then grab that overreach to pull him off the cliff and into destruction).
The oil and strategic position of Iraq viz. Iran, Russia, Turkey, etc., certainly helped make the case and pushed aside what might have been probable objections (if we invade, how can we survive an oil boycott, a la 1973?), but saying that it was a "war for oil" as is sometimes claimed doesn't really wash. You don't need to go to war for oil at the price the US goes to war for, you just buy the damn oil. You go to war for things you can't buy with money.
I still don't understand why everyone keeps bringing this up as evidence that our approach towards NK is war mongering. Maybe some attention to NK has more to do with China and Russia than people tend to focus on, but it doesn't mean NK isn't a bad actor.
The true motivations of the different actors are diverse and as the president and his team is effectively above the law since Obama said he would not open an investigation for war crimes, we will have only speculations.
Bush may have had the willingness to continue his father's job or just simple religious beliefs: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/a...
Dick Cheney is the salient case for oil. He had enormous conflicts of interest, having led Halliburton, who reaped enormous war contracts in Iraq. John Kerry called for an investigation in 2004 about that: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/us/a-closer-look-at-cheney... We also know that hundreds of millions of dollars were erroneously/fraudulently charged to the US: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/...
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are core believer of the "Project for the New American Century" thinktank that sees the war against terrorism as WW4 (Cold War being WW3) and sees seizing oil resources as primordial. Yes, this is a really simplistic vision, but remember that these people are just slightly more intellectual than Trump's team...
The general public is a bit more forgiving when you're taken down by a nation state rather than a bunch of criminals preying on a deliberately unlocked door.
Microsoft, probably being mildly cognizant that you don't win new contracts by accusing lucrative customers of rank fucking idiocy especially when it's true, will naturally play along with the conspiracy theory, especially since the chances of strong evidence pointing to the actual culprits coming to light are so low.
I can see why Microsoft would want to deflect attention from its own failings to the bogeyman of the week, but I'm not sure what qualifies a private business to "officially" pronounce on weighty geopolitical matters that could result in WWIII.
When Microsoft falsely blamed Intel for Microsoft Surface failures[1], or falsely marked a non-Microsoft web browser as malware and removed it from thousands of PCs[2], at least the lives of millions of people weren't at stake.
A nation state would collapse long before it reached the point of being so broke it had to rely on - FFS - a Bitcoin ransomware attack to survive. I can't believe I'm actually having to type such an obvious thing, but apparently some people think otherwise.
What's North Korea's back up plan for economic survival, a chain letter?
It's a sorry world when people give the time of day to such transparently obvious and nonsensical propaganda, intended to suck us into yet another bloodbath, just because NK isn't a nice place to live.
> as did the UK government, neither of whom is trying to lay the groundwork for war.
Assuming that wasn't as a joke: the UK has been a lapdog of the USA (aka "Special Relationship"[3]) if not since WWII, certainly since the 1980s, when British people themselves openly referred to their country, even in popular chart songs[4][5], as the 51st State.
Of course the UK lacks the status and relevance in Washington DC of a real US state, and is simply treated (and behaves accordingly) like a reserve branch of US armed forces, supporting wars that serve US interests, including the one where at least 20% of North Korean human beings were exterminated by the US military.
[1] https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/microsoft-surface/132832/her...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-falsely-labels-chrome-as...
[3] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/obama-us-uk-j...
Citation?
My understanding is than they are likely able to hit the continental US with an unarmed ICBM, and that it is highly unlikely that they would be able to do so with the added weight of a nuclear warhead.
1. NK has boats
2. Boats sail across oceans
3. Bombs fit on boatsThere is a realistic concern about the pace of their developments, though, which is IMO the real food for thought.
Most analysis from more than 12 months ago did not assume they would make the advances in missile range or throw weight that they have, which raises concerns that another state is helping them (actively or inadvertently). If that is the case, they might also be able to miniaturize their weapons more quickly than originally estimated as well.
Absent some outside factor, it's safe to assume that at some point in the not too distant future, they will get the combination of weapon mass down, and missile throw weight up, such that the two meet and give them enough range to hit the continental US.
Most arms control theories suggest that it's better to be clear about what your responses will be to particular stimulus ("deterrence signals"), in order to reduce the threat of an accidental war. IMO, if the US leadership was more competent or even credibly sane, the best-possible response to N. Korea would be a system of "red lines" composed of DPRK actions and pre-planned US reactions, in consultation or at least full view of other nuclear states (principally China and Russia; the South Koreans would hopefully have some say over the responses, although they might do well to distance themselves). I've read some essays that suggest there was an understanding between the US and USSR in the 80s regarding Libya to something like this effect.
But of course, the US is not really credible at the moment in terms of internal consistency or rational behavior, which makes rational-actor game theory, on which a lot of deterrence is based, difficult.
Marcus Hutchins a British security researcher registered this domain.
As the domain offswitch ping was obvious Hutchins was seemingly the only competent researcher who read the source code.
Hutchins, Britain's Saviour of the NHS[2] (Britain's National Health Service) was outed by the British tabloid press that published his home address.
Next Marcus Hutchins was arrested while attending DefCon and is currently awaiting trial in the US on unrelated charges. [3]
Wannacry had spread throughout the NHS and was preventing actual life saving operations, it spread on some Microsoft XP and mostly unpatched 7 systems, from the audit:
"NHS Digital told us that all organisations infected by WannaCry shared the same vulnerability and could have taken relatively simple action to protect themselves .
... NHS Digital told us that the majority of NHS devices infected were unpatched but on supported Microsoft Windows 7 operating systems. Unsupported devices (those on XP) were in the minority of identified issues. NHS Digital has also confirmed that the ransomware spread via the internet, including through the N3 network (the broadband network connecting all NHS sites in England),"[4] NHS Digital Audit
[1] https://whoapi.com/blog/3079/what-is-the-domain-name-that-st...
[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nhs-cyber-att...
[3] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/marcus-hutchi...
[3] https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Investigat...
From a comedic dystopian science fiction perspective this coincides the politics of underfunding the NHS, institutional costs of running Microsoft's patches on vital life-saving equipment, the US intelligence services offensive rather than defensive playbook, and an "unlikely" hero.
Might make a great novel except if ludicrously we are about to live it as a pretext.
If iirc it was an accidental discovery of the kill switch. He noticed the pings to the domain, noticed it was un-reg’ed, thought “hmmm if I reg this domain I will be able to see how many other infections and their location when they ping home”. So reg’ed the domain.
It was then when he noticed the code would quit out if the domain was in use.
* 'Remember the Maine' instigated the Spanish-American War, but much evidence says the Maine was destroyed by accident. William Randolph Hearst, a leading publisher of yellow journalism, famously promised a compatriot: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war".
* The Gulf of Tonkin incident instigated American involvment in the Vietnam War.
* Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, which didn't exist, instigated the Iraq War.
In today's case, I trust the source much less than many of those who have made prior errors. I also note that it was a the head of Homeland Security, a political appointee, who made the accusation. It was not the head of the FBI or an intelligence agency; it is not represented, at least in the reporting I've seen, as a consensus of the US intelligence community; I also note that the White House has left some distance between itself and the accusation - it's not made by the President or his National Security Advisor, for example.
Also, the very serious accusation rings of hype. North Korea has acted especially badly, largely unchecked, for more than a decade, which is false and a political swipe at the prior President. If that part of the accusation is exaggerated and political, I wonder about the other parts, and I wonder about the accusers ability or willingness to separate politics from very serious policy.
How is that false?
PS: The US government isn't the only group pointing the finger in the direction of NK here [1] [2].
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40297493
[2] https://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/wannacry-ransomware-a...
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/he-ran-nor... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_39#Purpose_and_activities [2]http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/05/news/economy/north-korea-eco...
> 'WannaCry' does neatly fit the profile of Room 39
Let's keep in mind that for state-level intelligence agencies, sophisticated frame jobs are normal activities and attribution of IT attacks is difficult. Again, that doesn't rule out NK in any way, but in this situation the profile of behavior doesn't tell us much (though I do value the other evidence in the parent).
You couldn't be more wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_border_incidents_invol...
They've tried to kill the South Korean president every chance they got, kidnap citizens to train spies, blew up civilian airplanes, killed an American soldier over a fucking tree near the DMZ, multiple tunnels underground for invasion discovered, Pueblo, shelled an island, sunk a frigate.
Yeah I'd say they are unchecked and have been acting bad ever since day 1. I mean the whole Korean War started because of that one fat fuck.
North Korea may have been acting badly, but we can't exactly claim the moral high ground. "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"
ah there's the whataboutism
it's an overused and a poor case against the West.
Yes, North Korea has been acting particularly bad, as Korean, it strongly irks me when people talk out of their mouth when they aren't familiar with the subject.
South Korea has constantly suffered the brunt of North Korea aggression. It's hard to continue a logical debate with somebody who rejects facts and continues to make illogical arguments.
Seems like you are born in Czech. I think USSR was in the right when they crushed dissent because Czech was a bad communist country. See how that works?
It also sounds like you're trying to rile me up by making a very "edgy" comment about the Prague Spring but that won't work because:
a) I'm not Czech (the "we" I'm referring to is the UK, my home country)
b) It was a poorly crafted analogy, in kinda poor taste
I have trouble understanding people defending a country like North Korea out of all places with little understanding of the danger they pose and have posed since day 1.
Dude, this is getting too weird for me I'm afraid. I'm out.
I'll agree that leaving a misleading digital trail is, relatively speaking, easy, but that doesn't mean it's false either - it is entirely fitting with how NK is known to operate.
The false statement is not that NK is acting badly, but that they are largely unchecked. The U.S. maintains a large military presence and major alliance in S. Korea for the purpose of checking NK. They arm SK and Japan and train with them, specifically to check NK. They pass end enforce domestic and international sanctions, intercept NK ships, spy on NK, and infiltrate and sabotage NK's military programs. The claim that NK is largely unchecked is absurd.
The US is clearly the one to blame for WannaCry. If it wasn't for the NSA leaking and not reporting vurnerabilities this would probably never have happened.
Theorizing about the ways one might perfectly cover all traces of an attack is quite a bit different from executing an attack against a large organization, moving through their systems and networks to look for sensitive data, exfiltrating the data, and then repeating this process for dozens of targets, year after year, without ever being detected or ever leaving a trace of anything.
Considering the kill switch the person behind this clearly didn't have much experience, so I find it very very hard to belive that some other state than the US was involved in this.
The Trump administration is clearly pushing for a stronger take on North Korea and its had no problems lying in the past. Sure North Korea might be behind this, but at this point Trumps credibility is so low they might as well be blaming unicorns.
Is this a thing that is possible to do? Given that the trump admin is literally the highest office in the US, and it's common for the lower orgs to parrot things from the top, it seems very difficult to make this distinction.
Amusingly enough, when the page showed up, I saw the accompanying video thumbnail which was precisely a hand with a pointing finger.
it's very rich coming from a country who facilitates (cough!! NSA) warrantless surveillance on it's own citizens.
I'm still trying to remember when I was asked of this would be OK.
North Korea has no place in this discussion. The entity responsible for the WannaCry debacle is a US-based spy organization we all know and love.
Maybe. There's probably also a lot of countries who would love nothing more than to grab some popcorn and watch the U.S. and North Korea start nuking each other, much the same way that the U.S. 'manages' the Middle East and South America by getting random countries to start genociding each other.
Since many of these machines ran critical services, this was a hostile act against the general public of the United States and all blame falls on them.
They did make Microsoft aware, and a patch was pushed out.
Those affected had not patched their systems, unfortunately a bit common in some enterprises. So giving Microsoft a heads up has little to do with it.
The simple truth is that we decimated Korea, a country on the other side of the world, with horrific bombings, an invasion and subsequent occupation that has lasted for over half a century (and which continues to this very day). The bifurcation of the Koreas was (and remains) the direct result of our military adventures. Our "ally" South Korea was a military dictatorship until well into the 1980s. Unfortunately not 1 in 100 Americans could find Korea on a map, let alone describe the history of our involvement there. Consequently, its very easy to paint the North Koreans as some sort of unhinged bunch of lunatics that simply "hate us for our freedoms" rather than for atrocities we actually committed. This lack of understanding and ignorance of history is what allows the "bipartisan" war party of Democrats and Republicans in Congress to paint opponents of war and advocates of peace as "Russian propagandists".
We stand on the edge of what could very well be a civilization-ending war (in more than one place) while most Americans nod dully, with glazed over eyes, uncritically accepting government propaganda as gospel. In the not-so-recent past I was chided by the owner of HN for quoting Goebbels to describe the tactics of our government and the ignorance of our people, but silence is complicity. The North Korea situation (like the "Russia conspiracy") once again demands its recitation:
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
There's a sequence in Takashi Miike's "Izo" that's very reminiscent of that Goebbels quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKG6eOSwSa4 Izo was a samurai/assassin who was crucified in 1865, and the film is an extended (and extremely bloody) meditation on social manipulation.
You forget that NK is still technically at war with South Korea. It's been non-stop conflict for 60+ years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_121
It's not particularly hard to get some software people. You may notice they've trained and hired enough people to run their nuclear program. That's a lot harder than cobbling together some software exploits.
Suddam Hussain used a Canadian to build his supergun for example.
> Bull then started work on the "real" PC-2 machine, a gun that was 150 meters long, weighed 2,100 tonnes, with a bore of one meter (39 inches). It was to be capable of placing a 2,000-kilogram projectile into orbit.
Also noticed you were downvoted, can't figure why anyone would do that. Maybe they disagree that NK can employ black hats, but why not just comment on that in a reply...
The critical problem with using a gun though, is the sheer amount of force applied when firing the gun. They couldn't even get dummy payloads to work correctly, the rockets motors warped due to the forces involved.
Although ridiculously difficult and inefficient, it's possible to achieve orbit with just a gun, and another body's gravitational field. It doesn't need to be captured by said field, it can just be influenced enough to stabilise it's orbit.
> In a three-body or larger system, a gravity assist trajectory might be available such that a carefully aimed escape velocity projectile would have its trajectory modified by the gravitational fields of other bodies in the system such that the projectile would eventually return to orbit the initial planet using only the launch delta-v [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun#Getting_to_orbit
The Iraqis didn't have the rocket technology (of course, that's why they hired Bull!), which would probably have looked like the US "Sprint" missile, and at the very raw edge of what was feasible at the time.
Interestingly, though, you can get from the Moon back to the Earth using only a gun-type launcher, IIRC. Some lunar mining concepts use this as a way for mined minerals to get back home without uneconomical use of rocket fuel -- typical schemes I've seen tossed around use various electromagnetic launchers with solar panels or nuclear reactors providing the juice. I've never run the numbers myself -- maybe some Kerbal Space Program junkie can figure it out though?
Probably the best use case for gun-type launchers is for orbital transfers of unmanned cargo. There were some neat ideas tossed around in the 80s of having a big satellite or space station with a nuclear reactor serve as a launch platform for small cargo pods, which would lack their own engines. As long as you balanced the number of "up" and "down" pods, you could keep the launch platform in an approximately stable orbit, supposedly. Very hard to do without a big honking nuclear reactor though.
There's an awesome book called "Mig Pilot" by John Barron that details the story of a Soviet defector in the 80s. He talks about how he believed everything from the US was actually propaganda. He didn't even believe the grocery stores were real. It's a fascinating read.
If you're a North Korean hacker, you're probably living better than 95% of the country. You and your family probably get to live in Pyongyang and get good food, housing, healthcare, opportunities for your children, and so forth.
Why would you risk that? What could you, as one person, possibly do that would have any chance of success in fixing your country? The only thing you would get is your whole family thrown into a labor camp for the rest of your lives.
What's the implication here? That the US is somehow unjustified in being alarmed by NK becoming a full nuclear power, soon with worldwide ICBM range?
Think about the situation in that country. A small cabal of crooks lives like kings while the rest of the country suffers a never ending reign of terror, involving public executions in school yards, horrific labor camps, total surveillance, punishment of whole families, etc. The guy in charge is a sicko who executed his uncle with an anti-aircraft gun, and probably had a good laugh throughout the whole thing. The previous leader, his father, did such things as kidnap South Korean actors to force them to put on shows for him. These are deeply deranged people.
Now imagine that regime on the verge of collapse, for one of the many possible reasons that could happen. The cabal of crooks know that they will all be executed by the North Korean people for their crimes.
How sure are you that, when that moment comes, the regime won't launch nukes against all of their longtime enemies, just for the hell of it as a parting fuck you to the world?
That North Korea is justified in building up their arsenal to protect themselves from a country that has actively sought to topple other governments it simply just doesn't like.
That vast majority of threats North Korea makes are "If America does this, we will retaliate." Meanwhile, American politicians endlessly call for preemptive strikes on Iran and North Korea because they've allegedly been on the verge of wiping out humanity for decades now. I've stopped buying the bullshit, but the "Kim Jong Un got gout from cheese and died but only before killing his uncle with an antiaircraft gun" headlines keep rolling.
See: Libya, Vietnam, Iraq.
Every few years Americans say "never again", until the media sells the same lies as before and people forget.
[0] https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7174-lifting_the_fog_on_red_star...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_border_incidents_invol...
Incidents ranging all the way up to shelling South Korea and torpedoing their ships.
The country has literally been at war since 1950.
They also have perhaps the most controlling state in history and they are disciplined, if poor. In fact, according to a holocaust survivor who was subsequently a judge at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, North Korea's political prison system is as bad as or worse than the Nazis'. [2] They have zero human rights, no real justice system, gays and lesbians are put to death, mixed-blood children are murdered by the state (the government is openly and bone-chillingly racist).
As for "zero conflicts" you can thank geography and Pax Americana for that as there has been no one for the North Koreans' to attack, though have been constant int'l abductions and assassinations (incl an attempt on the South Korean president), the destruction of a passenger jet, the torpedoing of a South Korean navy vessel, the shelling of a South Korean island, constant drug sales and arms sales by the government including the sale and construction of a nuclear plant to and for Syria, the sale of chemical weapons (those kids killed in gas attacks in Syria, yep, North Korean gas), the overseas sale of hard drugs by the government to raise foreign revenue, and most important and egregious, the wholesale murder and enslavement of their own citizens, if the word "citizen" can be used. In the 1990's during the "Arduous March" the government allowed up to a million people, 5% or the population, to starve unnecessarily while food aid was diverted to the military and funds were used to build up their nuclear program. Malnutrition was the norm. Since being established by the Soviet Union, the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea -- and the only honest word that name is "Korea") have consistently threatened their neighbors, once invading South Korea with full force after receiving Stalin's approval (a fact which can be read in the Soviet archives). If they haven't attacked again, it's purely because they don't have the means. Oh yes, and they have been hacking, and are considered one of the world's seven cyberpowers along with the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K., Iran, and France. [3]
I don't mean to say that nobody ever has a happy life in North Korea. And I don't have time to go on and on about North Korea, but to pretend that they are mere victims is ludicrous. They inherit some of the worst aspects of the old Joseon Dynasty, the Japanese Empire, and Stalin-era Soviet Union, and manage to add to that.
This isn't to say that the U.S. is without significant blame, of course not. For example the U.S. punished and traumatize North Koreans with an unbelievably destructive wartime bombing campaign after the North invaded the South. But despite serious mistakes the overall aim of the U.S. has been to create a world of growth and stability. During this Pax Americana, with and because of the help from allies and the creation of a global community of states, the world has indeed grown faster than ever before, despite everything that's gone wrong, and there has been less violence.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15480571
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/north-korean-prisons-na...
[3] https://www.vox.com/world/2017/10/13/16465882/north-korea-cy...