N. Koreans 'hack' South game sites

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The scandal shaking up South Korea's main spy agency is not cloak-and-dagger stuff, but the kind of low-grade trickery anyone with an Internet connection could pull off. And the target was not Seoul's opaque rival to the north, but the country's own people.

SEOUL, Korea, Republic Of — Key North Korean websites were back online Tuesday after an hours-long shutdown that followed a U.S. vow to respond to a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures that Washington blames on Pyongyang. The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the U.S. government was responsible for the Internet shutdown in one of the least-wired and poorest countries in the world.

North Korea on Sunday lashed out at South Korea for accusing Pyongyang of hacking Seoul online game sites and stealing prize money, rejecting the allegations as an "unacceptable provocation."Seoul police said earlier this month they had busted a criminal gang which hired some 30 elite North Korean computer hackers to break into online game sites and steal prize points worth 6.4 billion won ($5.9 million).They said some of the proceeds for the hackers-- graduates of top colleges in Pyongyang and based in northeast China-- apparently went to the North's regime.

Life inside a communist country with a controlling dictator for a leader is not only suffocating and dangerous; it's also vastly different from life in developed countries elsewhere across the globe.

Whether North Korea was responsible for the Sony hack or not, the consensus is that North Korea has some of the best hackers in the world.

Los Angeles (AFP) - The devastating cyberattack on Sony Pictures could see the Hollywood studio lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and incur massive recovery costs, experts say.