A researcher who wrote a breathless article about North Korea’s Kimsuky hacking group didn’t pull off some sophisticated nation-state level operation. Reading through a fat (35MB PDF) Phrack article “APT Down: The North Korea Files,” what emerges is a story of lowly operational security failures that would make any intelligence professional wince.

This wasn’t Ocean’s anything. This was more like a blind man with a seeing eye dog strolls through an unlocked front door.

Delicious Breadcrumbs

The most striking aspect isn’t any technical sophistication because there is such complete lack of basic security hygiene on the North Korean side. The researcher, going by “Saber,” appears to have gained access to not just Kimsuky’s operational infrastructure, but their personal development environment. We’re talking about the digital equivalent of finding a spy’s diary, complete with their passwords and personal photos.

Consider the exposure: Chrome browser history showing Google searches for error messages, drag-and-drop files between Windows and Linux machines containing active malware, and even Google Pay transactions for VPN services. The operator, referred to as “KIM,” left behind a complete digital footprint that reads like a how-to guide for terrible personal security.

Consumer Tools as State Hackery

The technical details reveal operations relied heavily on off-the-shelf tools and services. KIM was using:

• Standard VPN services (PureVPN, ZoogVPN) paid for through Google Pay
• Public GitHub repositories for code hosting
• Consumer-grade VMware for virtualization
• Regular Chrome browser with saved passwords and browsing history intact

This isn’t a properly tooled operation you’d expect from a trained state actor. It’s what you’d see from a moderately skilled technology worker in a coffee shop.

Chinese Holidays

One of the most revealing operational security failures was temporal. The researcher notes that KIM follows Chinese public holiday schedules, taking time off during the Dragon Boat Festival when North Korea would normally be working. This kind of behavioral pattern analysis used to be the exclusive domain of anthropologists hired into intelligence agencies, yet now it’s right there in the login timestamps for anyone paying attention.

Even more damaging: KIM’s Chrome configuration shows he uses Google Translate to convert error messages to Chinese, and his browsing history includes Taiwanese government and military websites. More red flags than a Chinese military parade.

Infrastructure Tells Stories

There is also a surprisingly, not surprised, centralized operation. Rather than distributed, compartmentalized systems, of proper statecraft everything appears to run through a small number of servers and VPS instances. The researcher found:

• Active phishing campaigns against South Korean government agencies
• Complete source code for email platform compromises
• Development versions of Android malware
• Cobalt Strike configurations and deployment scripts

This level of access suggests either a fundamental misunderstanding of compartmentalization, a laziness or a resource constraint. Possibly all of the above.

State Script Kiddie

What’s perhaps most damning is the technical skill level on display. The malware samples and attack tools are competent but hardly edgy or novel. The TomCat remote kernel backdoor, for instance, uses hardcoded passwords and relies on relatively simple TCP connection hijacking.

*smacks head*

The Android malware appears to be modified versions of existing tools without any custom development, even when the cost of custom development is now zero. This tracks with the operational security failures. We see an operation that feels more like an organized cybercriminal group that happens to be state-sponsored rather than a professional intelligence service.

It’s important, if you think about why a country as insignificant as Russia gets so much news. The answer is that it’s being run by one of the largest professional intelligence services in the world.

Constraints of Korea

The deeper story here is what failures reveal about North Korea’s state capabilities. The sloppiness suggests, like a Trump brand, operating under significant skill and resource constraints, possibly with limited access to skilled personnel and proper infrastructure.

How do you say “big balls” in Korean?

The reliance on consumer services, the mixing of personal and operational activities, the poor compartmentalization—these all point to an operation lacking institutional capabilities. North Korea has political will for asymmetric operations, but they have gone so far into asymmetric as to lack professionalism.

It’s Bananas (or M*A*S*H)

The researcher’s success in penetrating this operation raises uncomfortable questions about attribution and capability assessments. If a single individual can gain this level of access to a state-sponsored hacking group, what does that say about our industry of hyping up nation-state cyber threats as greater than corporations and bad actors?

The traditional model assumes sophisticated adversaries while the Kimsuky breach suggests something more realistic: state actors who are dangerous not because of their sophistication, but because of their persistence and their targets. They’re the cyber equivalent of tax collectors—not particularly skilled, but willing to keep trying doors until they find one that’s unlocked.

What makes this most interesting from a security blogger’s perspective is how the researcher approached the material. Rather than just dumping files or making vague attribution claims, they conducted what amounts to a comprehensive investigative analysis. They traced infrastructure connections, analyzed behavioral patterns, and even provided context about North Korean holiday schedules. Hats off to that!

This is investigative journalism conducted with root access. Instead of filing FOIA requests to understand government surveillance programs, the researcher simply accessed the surveillance infrastructure directly. The methodology is different, but the end result—detailed public reporting on previously hidden government activities—is remarkably similar to traditional journalism.

Competence Gaps

While we focus on advanced persistent threats of nation-state actors, we shouldn’t lose sight of the more mundane: poorly resourced operations run by moderately skilled technicians who make the same basic mistakes as everyone else.

Attackers only have to make a mistake once.

The Kimsuky breach suggests that mystique around nation-state hacking may be an unfortunate distraction from the threat of well-resourced commercial bad actors. Who is more resourced and trained, the ex-NSA sipping Mai-Tai on a lounger at Facebook or a graduate student in North Korea? Strip away the geopolitical implications here, and what you’re left with is fairly standard network compromise enabled by poor security practices. The only thing “advanced” about this particular threat was its persistence and targeting—the technical execution was thoroughly ordinary.

In an age where we’re constantly pushed into political and security theater, the Kimsuky files offer a different perspective: sometimes the threats come not from technical brilliance, but from persistence combined with institutional incompetence. And sometimes, that incompetence creates opportunities for accountability that traditional oversight mechanisms could never achieve.