Looking for help with its cyberdefenses, South Korea is trying a straightforward approach: cash prizes.
The defense ministry and the National Intelligence Service are jointly sponsoring a computer-security competition, meant to help “to locate and train talented cybersecurity experts nationwide to cope with increasing cybersecurity threats,” as the ministry put it in a statement Monday. It announced that 98 of the 1,100 competitors who entered the contest earlier this month had qualified for the final round, set for Korea Military Academy Sept. 28 and 29.
- Reuters
- South Korea seeks the equivalent to defend its cyberspace.
The winners—six individuals and six teams—will share total prize money of 80 million won ($74,000).
Cyberattacks crippled a number of South Korean government and news-media websites in June, three months after hostile hackers caused the crash of thousands of computers South Korean TV stations and banks. South Korea’s government blamed both attacks—and similar ones in 2009, 2011 and 2012—on North Korea, which Seoul says has thousands of hackers operating on its behalf. Pyongyang denies engaging in any cyberattacks.
A month after the June attacks, the Seoul government said it would boost its cyberdefense expertise by training 5,000 new cybersecurity experts by 2017.
The computer-security competition was open to the public. This weekend’s final round will test the finalists’ skills at defending computer systems from mock attacks.
In addition to the cash, the winners will have a leg up getting a suitable job in the military or the NIS—and government financing if they seek relevant training at home or abroad.
There’s currently no freedom of speech and true democracy in South Korea. There is a McCarthyism frenzy going on where they slander anyone that criticizes the governments methods as ‘communists’. Professors, students, activists, basically anyone. No one can even speak and western media never covers what’s really going on with the people, pretty funny.