Martyn Williams
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Homepage: http://www.northkoreatech.org
Posts by Martyn Williams
State Dept. remains sure on DPRK involvement in Sony hack
Dec 30th
The State Department said Monday that it remains confident in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s conclusion that North Korea was responsible for the cyber attack on Sony — despite a growing number of voices saying that might not be the case.
There has been some skepticism about North Korea’s involvement since the first reports earlier in December and that has increased in the last week.
- Linguistic analysis of the English suggests a Russian speaker, not a Korean
- The IP addresses used by the hackers were on compromised machines that could have been used by anyone.
- One of the latest reports suggests that a former Sony employee might have More >
Red Star 3.0 Desktop – The install
Dec 30th
The operating system is being offered as a 2.6 gigabyte ISO file, which means it will look like a CD or DVD install disc to most modern operating systems. The operating system can be directly installed from the ISO file and requires about 10 gigabytes of disc space.
I installed mine inside a Virtual Machine — a piece of software that allows it to run inside a window as an application on my laptop — but it’s possible to also run it as the main operating system on a computer.
The installation process is relatively easy. I have most of the main More >
Red Star 3.0 Desktop finally becomes public
Dec 30th
The latest version of North Korea’s home-grown desktop operating system, Red Star Linux 3.0, was uploaded to BitTorrent on Monday.
We first got a look at the operating system almost a year ago when screenshots were posted online.
A link to a download file was included in a message on Pastebin that was uploaded by someone who goes by the nicknames “slipstream” and “raylee,” that’s the same person who released the server version of Red Star Linux 3.0 earlier this year.
That previous release was a version for computer servers while this latest release is intended for use on conventional PCs.
I’ve posted an install guide and will have more on the applications More >
North Korea’s Internet suffers more attacks
Dec 29th
North Korea’s Internet connection with the world suffered outages on December 27 and December 28.
The latest instability on the connection began around 0400 UTC (1 p.m. local time in Pyongyang) on Sunday and continued for a couple of hours, according to monitoring by Dyn Research. The U.S.-based organization recorded several instances in which connections to the four sub-networks that make up the North Korean Internet were completely unavailable.
An outage between North Korea and the Internet on December 28, 2014 (Image: Dyn Research)
The outage followed a larger one on Saturday evening that appears to have begun at around 1040 UTC (7:40 p.m. More >
North Korea accuses US of Internet disturbance
Dec 27th
North Korea has accused the U.S. of disrupting its Internet service and has renewed a call to participate in a joint investigation into claims that it hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment.
[UPDATE: English recording of Voice of Korea added below.]
The country’s websites were offline for more than nine hours on December 22 after an apparent denial of service attack.
In a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Saturday, the country’s National Defence Commission laid blame for the Internet problem at the feet of the U.S., saying the country “started disturbing the internet operation of major media of the DPRK.”
Earlier in the week, the U.S. More >
Voice of Korea on the Sony hack
Dec 23rd
North Korea’s powerful National Defense Commission responded with its first statement on the Sony hack and accusations by the U.S. that it was responsible. The statement was read out on Voice of Korea, the country’s international shortwave radio service, and makes interesting listening.
It’s not exactly the same as the text statement that was carried on KCNA and appears to be a slightly different translation.
The most noticeable thing about the statement is how much the NDC appears to be picking up from cues in the U.S. media. Many of its arguments are similar to those being debated in public:
- Killing a head of state, More >
North Korea’s Internet back after probable attack
Dec 23rd
North Korea’s Internet connection with the world has returned to service after a nine and a half hour outage that followed hours of patchy performance.
The cause of the outage is unknown, although several experts think it was probably due to an external distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This involves flooding web servers and other Internet hardware with so much traffic that they become overloaded and cannot respond to legitimate traffic. It’s not an actual hack of the system and so the situation is normalized soon after the DDOS flow of traffic stops.
Dyn Research provided this graph of the attack that shows More >
North Korea’s Internet link is flaky today
Dec 22nd
If you’ve been trying to connect to North Korean Internet sites in the last 24 hours, you might have been unsuccessful.
Connectivity between North Korea and the rest of the world has been spotty for much of the time, according to Dyn Research.
Look at the graph below. Each period of purple corresponds to an outage on North Korea’s Internet connection.
Is this related to all that’s been going on in the last few days? Possibly. North Korea’s Internet connection does suffer from periodic outages, so it could be something as mundane as network maintenance or a failing router.
On the other hand…
“I haven’t seen such More >
Where do we stand on the Sony hack?
Dec 22nd
It’s been a busy few days for North Korea watchers. After a couple of weeks of no solid news on the Sony hack, the FBI has finally released a few details from its preliminary investigation
That’s great news because there has been a lot of confused reporting on the case. The leaks from the FBI have generally come through national security reporters, not computer security reporters, so we’ve seen a number of differing claims:
There was general confusion about the common hacker practice of routing traffic through compromised machines in other countries. Here are some headlines from last week:
- Evidence in Sony hack attack More >
Kim Jong Un probably doesn’t want you to see these either
Dec 22nd
Whether North Korea is behind the hacking of Sony or not, it’s certainly not too pleased with the movie and doesn’t want it shown. Sony pulled the movie from theaters and said Sunday it’s figuring out a video-on-demand related. In the meantime, here are a few move videos that Pyongyang probably doesn’t like too much: This report, from the CBS show “60 Minutes,” interviews Shin Dong-hyuk. He was born in “Camp 14,” a North Korean labor camp, and managed to escape to tell the tale of the horrors of North Korea’s gulags.
Sky News goes to South Korea to talk to North More >
