Internet
Orascom planning 3G Internet service
Oct 17th
Orascom Telecom is planning to add Internet service to its 3G cellular offering in North Korea, according to the Choson Exchange blog.
Writing in a post on Sunday, Geoffrey K. See, the organization’s executive director and founder, says the service is currently being tested but should be available in the near future. The information on the service came from a meeting with Orascom employees in Pyongyang.
At first it will be available to resident foreigners living in Pyongyang. So far there is no approval for a wider service, even in censored form, for the North Korean subscribers. Orascom didn’t provide any details on More >
Seoul eyes harsher crackdown on “pro-NK” websites
Oct 14th
South Korean prosecutors are launching a crackdown on websites and users judged to be posting “pro-North Korean” material, according to several local press reports.
The action comes as regulators judge the amount of such material available to South Korean citizens has “mushroomed to a risky level,” according to prosecutors quoted by Yonhap News said.
North Korea’s state-run media outlets have spent the last year launching several propaganda-filled sites that report on aspects of life in the country and extol the benefits of the country’s political system and its leaders. The outlets have also expanded onto social media with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels.
The ease with More >
Kim Han-Sol’s Internet footprint
Oct 3rd
The teenager believed to be the 16 year-old grandson of Kim Jong Il has scrambling to delete or block access to his Internet social media accounts after news spread of his admission into a Bosnian school.
Attention was focused on the accounts — one on Facebook and two on Twitter — after South Korean media reported that Kim Han Sol had been accepted into the United World College in Mostar, Bosnia.
Pictures posted on the social media services, including the one to the right, were published by South Korean media organizations before access was restricted. The images and comments written by Kim Han More >
South Korea’s online blocking sharply rose in 2010
Sep 18th
The number of requests by South Korean police for the deletion of Internet content alleged to be pro-North Korean has soared in the past two years, according to a report in the Dong-A Ilbo.
Police submitted 80,449 requests to the Korea Communications Standards Commission for the removal of online postings in 2010. That compares to 14,430 in 2009 and just 1,793 in 2008 and represents a 45-fold increase over the last two years, the newspaper said.
The annual deletions of North Korean content were pretty constant during the middle of the last decade at between 1,000 and 1,500 per year. They began More >
VOK on US hacking
Aug 4th
The Voice of Korea, North Korea’s international radio broadcaster, recently aired a commentary that took aim at several hacking incidents in the U.S., but the true aim of the piece appears to be the U.S. Department of Defense’s recently published Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace.
The U.S. document, a declassified version of which is available online, brings together cyber strategies and thinking throughout the DoD. The classified version also says major cyber attacks can constitute acts of war, according to reports.
The VOK commentary begins with the hack of Fox News’ Twitter stream that saw a message posted that U.S. President Barack More >
Koryo Tours hits out at South Korean web block
Aug 1st
Koryo Tours, the Beijing-based travel agent that specializes in tours of North Korea, says South Korea has “over reacted” in blocking its website since the beginning of this year.
The websites koryotours.com and koryogroup.com have been unavailable from South Korean Internet connections since January 26 this year, apparently a casualty of South Korea’s campaign to stop its citizens from seeing North Korean content.
“This came as a complete surprise – we had not been notified in advance or asked to explain particular content, nor notified afterwards and given an explanation,” the company said in a statement.
Koryo Tours said it arranged a meeting with the More >
Coding the Kims
Jul 20th
If you’ve spent time browsing some of North Korea’s official websites and looked closely enough, you might have spotted a slight change in the typeface every time Kim Jong Il or Kim Il Sung is mentioned.
Your eyes are not deceiving you. Official North Korean websites contain a custom style rule written into the page that is used when either of the Kims is mentioned.
Here’s are some examples. First, from the website of KCNA. Kim Jong Il is mentioned twice and both times his name is slightly bigger than the rest of the text.
At Voice of Korea it’s the same. The More >
Internet, mobile phones eyed for Mt. Kumgang
Jul 11th
North Korea plans to allow Internet access and the use of mobile phones by visitors to the Mount Kumgang tourism zone.
Visitors are typically relieved of their mobile phones when entering North Korea and public Internet access is not available inside the country.
But the country is establishing a special tourism zone around Mount Kumgang, the scenic North Korean mountain resort that was the subject of a previous tourism agreement with Hyundai. The South Korean company halted tours to the area in July 2008 after a South Korean tourist was accidentally shot while walking along a beach in the region.
More than a More >
North Korea behind March web attacks, says McAfee
Jul 6th
North Korea or parties closely tied to the country were almost certainly behind the March cyber attacks that took down several South Korean websites, according to a report from computer security company McAfee.
The report contains a detailed analysis of the attacks and how they were carried out.
Working with the governments of both South Korea and the U.S., the company reverse engineered the computer code used in the attacks to uncover its inner workings.
Infected computers that launched the attacks were controlled by two tiers of command server, communications between the systems was encrypted in several different systems and the whole network More >
North Korea’s Chinese IP addresses
Jun 26th
Cyber attacks against South Korean organizations have been much in the headlines in recent weeks. With each attempt to crash a web server, phish for private information or infiltrate a computer in South Korea, the country’s government points its finger of blame towards North Korea, but concrete evidence is often thin on the ground.
Investigators will typically try to trace a cyber attack by discovering the IP (Internet protocol) address from which it originated. Every computer on the Internet has such an address and discovering the source address will typically help identify the organization or service provider network from which the More >
