Internet
Google on North Korean maps
May 18th
The recent addition of North Korea to Google’s Maps service made up a small part of the company’s presentation to developers at its annual conference on Wednesday.
Brian McClendon, vice president of Google Maps, spoke about adding data and what it meant during at keynote speech at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.
North Korea had been a largely white area of Google Maps until it started publishing user-supplied data. Now a little information on Pyongyang and some of the major towns is included in the service, although it’s still far from complete.
Curtis Melvin’s North Korea Uncovered, even in the latest More >
Schmidt’s Washington speech on North Korea, Internet and dictatorships
May 13th
Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, speaks at the company’s Big Tent event in Washington, D.C., on April 26, 2013.
Google has posted video of Eric Schmidt’s remarks at the recent “Big Tent” event in Washington, D.C.
The Google-organized events act as idea summits and have been running for about three years and the D.C. event took place on April 26.
During his speech, the chairman of Google talked about North Korea and the impact that the connected world, and the Internet in particular, would have on authoritarian countries.
“In North Korea we visited with the government, of course that’s all there is in North More >
Anonymous promises more website attacks this weekend
May 11th
Members of the Anonymous hacking group say they are planning to re-launch attacks on North Korean websites from Sunday. [Updated. See below.]
In messages posted to Twitter, several Anonymous members said the “#OpNorthKorea” attacks would resume on May 12 from 1am GMT, that’s 10am in the morning Pyongyang time.
OpNorthKorea first began in late March, shortly after North Korean media said relations between it and South Korea were “at a state of war.” It took the form of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which involves flooding a website with so many requests for data that it becomes overloaded.
The attacks were successful in More >
Hacker publishes North Korean website hit list
May 7th
An unidentified Internet user posting under the name of the Anonymous hacking collective has published a “hit list” of North Korean websites.
The list is said to be related to a coordinated attack that hackers appear to be planning for June 25. The action is part of “OpNorthKorea,” which previously took sites in North Korea and China offline in a series of distributed denial of service attacks.
The message appears to have been translated from another language, probably Korean, into English and includes sites based in China, Japan, the U.S., Spain and a single website in Pyongyang.
The source of the list is unclear More >
Eric Schmidt and the North Korean Internet dilemma
Apr 23rd
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has said a little bit more about his January trip to Pyongyang. [Updated: see below]
The “private, humanitarian” mission, as Schmidt termed it, surprised many and saw him turn up in Pyongyang with his daughter Sophie Schmidt, Jared Cohen, head of the Google Ideas think tank, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and Kun “Tony” Namkung, a U.S.-based businessman that acts as a go-between in some deals between the U.S. and North Korea.
Schmidt and Cohen, who haven’t said much about the trip since leaving Pyongyang, penned a dual-bylined article in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday about the trip. The article, More >
Thousands more DPRK-related website account details published
Apr 21st
The personal details of thousands of users of three North Korean-related websites have been published by hackers.
The details include names, email addresses, user names and in some cases addresses and phone numbers of people to the three sites: the Japan-based Choson Sinbo (조선신보, 朝鮮新報) newspaper, the China-based Ryomyong (려명) site and the U.S.-based Korea American National Coordinating Council (재미동포전국연합회).
The details were apparently stolen by hackers working under the banner of the Anonymous group, who have been attacking North Korean-related websites for the last few weeks.
The largest database dump was that of the Choson Sinbo, which contained 3,667 records. The Ryomyong database numbered just over 1,300 users More >
DPRK reconfigures its Internet connection
Apr 9th
Hot on the heels of a series of attacks that have seen its Internet connectivity severely disrupted, the DPRK appears to be adding an additional route through which it links to the global Internet.
The new link began appearing in Internet addressing tables on Monday and connects from Star, the country’s sole Internet service provider, to China Unicom Hong Kong’s network.
Most of the Internet traffic to and from the country already runs over a link from mainland China that is serviced by China Unicom. Almost exactly a year ago, a second connection was added via Intelsat satellite.
The new connection appears to More >
Uriminzokkiri restoring after hack
Apr 7th
This week’s hack of the Uriminzokkiri website certainly raised the bar in the cyber battle currently playing out online.
It marked the first time in the current round of attacks that anyone had managed to break in and deface a North Korean website. Over the last couple of weeks, several sites have been taken offline by denial of service attacks, but such attacks simply impede the website’s ability to serve pages and don’t affect the content.
This time around the attack saw the site removed and its Twitter and Flickr channels accessed. The Flickr channel is back under a new account, it appears More >
More attacks pledged on North Korean websites
Apr 1st
People who apparently took part in this weekend’s denial of service attacks against several major North Korean websites have promised there’s more to come.
The attacks hit sites including KCNA, Voice of Korea, the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Nations and Air Koryo. They also targeted the Korean Friendship Association’s site although I wasn’t able to verify whether it went down.
A denial of service attack involves flooding a web server with so much traffic that it becomes overloaded and cannot respond to legitimate requests for pages. It’s different from the site being hacked, although the end result is similar in More >
#OpNorthKorea brings more attacks on DPRK websites
Mar 30th
A new round of attacks against North Korean websites began Saturday, causing several to become unavailable.
The attacks appear to be part of a loosely coordinated effort by hackers to target North Korean sites after the country’s state-run media said relations with South Korea were “at a state of war.”
As of 3pm Korean time (0600 UTC) on Saturday, attempts to contact the Naenara, Korean Central News Agency, Air Koryo and Voice of Korea all failed.
The sites were hit with an apparent DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in which the web servers are flooded with so much junk traffic from hackers More >
