Internet
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 >
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 >
Kim Il Sung University opens website
Dec 13th
Kim Il Sung University, North Korea’s most prestigious seat of higher learning, has become the first university in the country to launch a website on the global Internet.
The site is available in Korean and English and is being served from a computer in Pyongyang. It joins a handful of other websites that are run by the North Korean government and accessible from outside of the country.
The website of Kim Il Sung University (Photo: North Korea Tech)
The site is available at http://www.ryongnamsan.edu.kp
There’s much of what you would expect on a university website: a history, areas of study, an outline of some of More >
North Korea launches tourist website – although border remains closed
Dec 3rd
A month after foreign visitors are barred because of Ebola fears, dprktoday.com tries to lure tourists with pictures of smiling children and short-range missiles
A welcome given to visitors to DPRK Today, a North Korean tourism website (Photo: North Korea Tech)
By Maeve Shearlaw, The Guardian.
North Korea’s border is still closed because of Ebola, but that hasn’t stopped the country launching a website to promote itself as a destination for foreign tourists.
The site, dprktoday.com, offers an animated tour through the customs and culture available in the so-called hermit kingdom. A short film on the homepage welcomes prospective visitors, provides a handy locator of More >
KCNA imposter website disappears
Nov 27th
A website that on first glance closely resembled that of the state-run Korean Central News Agency, but in fact pointed to news articles critical of the country appears to be been taken offline.
The English-language site was available at www.kcna.co and was modeled on the KCNA website run from Pyongyang at www.kcna.kp.
On Thursday lunchtime (Korean time) the site disappeared to be replaced with an “account suspended” notice.
The message greeting visitors on Thursday morning to a page styled after KCNA (Photo: North Korea Tech)
The site had carried the same logo, same selection of languages and same categories of news as the official home page, although on the fake More >
Kwangmyong has been upgraded, says report
Nov 12th
Kwangmyong information service (Photo: Naenara)
Kwangmyong, North Korea’s online information service, has been upgraded.
The network serves scientific and technological information and has been expanded with a new search function that includes a translation function, according to a recent article on Naenara, the website of Pyongyang’s Korea Computer Center.
The article doesn’t go into great date on what exactly is new, but reports:
“Pak Sun Hyok and other programmers of the Information Technology Department set a goal of developing a function capable of referring to databases in different languages at one click with one Korean question through the automatic question-and-translate function and the immediate translating function More >
Report: Twitter, Facebook blocked in North Korea
Nov 4th
North Korea has begun blocking access to Twitter and Facebook on domestic Internet connections offered to foreigners, according to a report last week.
If correct, the move is apparently the first active blocking of Internet access by the North Korean government and comes at a time when it appears to be slowly tightening the screws on outflow of information via foreigners and tourists.
The block on the two popular social media sites was first reported by the Pyongyang correspondent of Russia’s ITAR-TASS news agency and was later confirmed by NK News.
On the surface, it stops the immediate posting of images and messages on the two More >
North Korean malware hit thousands of phones, says Seoul
Oct 30th
Malicious software disguised as a computer game could have infected around 20,000 smartphones in South Korea, according to South Korean media reports quoting the country’s spy agency.
The games were offered through South Korean sites between May 19 and September 16 this year, the National Intelligence Service said in a report to parliament.
The apps have since been removed and the actual number of phones infected is unclear.
While phones were infected, the software doesn’t appear to have caused any damage but has left the phones vulnerable to eavesdropping and remote video taping, the reports said.
North Korea has often been blamed for cyber attacks on South Korean companies and More >
