Faculty Project: Database of North Korean Cyber Operations
Faculty Director: Prof. John Park, Director, Korea Project, Harvard Kennedy School
This summer, I was a Research Assistant for Professor John Park at the Harvard Kennedy School-affiliated Belfer Center. Over ten weeks, I conducted a research project called ‘Database of North Korean Cyber Operations’. Effectively what this meant was that I would be examining North Korea’s activities, attacks, espionage acts in cyberspace. The end goal was to develop my own knowledge, assist Professor Park and his team in any research they needed, and publish my own article on the topic as a final deliverable. From beginning to the end, this summer internship has been educational and engaging.
I do not remember exactly how I became aware of the Korea Institute’s Undergraduate Research Assistantship program, likely through the mailing lists. Of the many projects they had available, the ‘Database of North Korean Cyber Operations’ project with Professor John Park aligned most closely with my interests. I had taken Professor Eckert’s Two Koreas class where Professor Park had been a guest speaker, so I had already been quite interested in Professor Park’s work. I applied per the instructions on KI’s website, including the submission of a writing sample. The writing sample was closely aligned with his research and was an article I had written for a student publication a while back.
To kickstart the summer RA-ship, Professor Park organised a Zoom call where we went over expectations and goals for the summer. He was clear that he wanted me to have a tangible product in the form of a published research article at the summer internship. He gave me a questionnaire for me to reflect and hone my research interests. He also organised a workshop with a former NSA analyst and North Korea cyber expert. It was a Zoom room with a few of his graduate students and was a very insightful conversation. Even though I had been studying this topic, hearing from an expert on the field provided insight that was not available in secondary sources.
The rest of the summer proceeded in a more flexible fashion interspersed with research workshops and check ins. Professor Park gave me research tasks and gave me the flexibility to complete them in my own time and at my own pace. One standout task was building a database of North Korean cyber operations. Although I had not expected to find much beyond the secondary literature review that Professor Park had given me, I was pleasantly surprised that the existing literature had not yet perfectly completed the DPRK puzzle and there was plenty of space to pose original questions and conduct interesting research.
In culmination of my summer research, I am currently writing my own research article to be published on the Belfer Center. It will likely be published over the next few weeks. Even though the RA-ship has leaked slightly over the summer, I am glad to see my research manifest in a tangible product that I can point. I am grateful for Professor Park’s guidance as well as the coordination from the Korea Institute to make this summer possible.