Websites
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 >
Voice of Korea dumps own player, adopts Flash
Mar 26th
The website of Voice of Korea, the DPRK’s international shortwave radio service, has dumped its proprietary software player.
The site previously required use of the player by users to hear its audio clips posted online (see, right), but that’s not now the case.
Users can now listen with Flash, and that opens the audio up for the first time to Mac and Linux users. It also means that Windows users who were uneasy about downloading a North Korean software package onto their computers can now listen to the audio.
Users don’t have to download the linked Flash package. Flash can be downloaded from More >
North Korea: The Podcast
Mar 21st
Uriminzokkiri, the Chinese-based website that carries most of North Korea’s official propaganda output, has started a podcast and it’s available through Apple’s iTunes.
The podcast is advertised on the front page of the website with a link that jumps to an Apple iTunes page. The page currently carries ten episodes of the podcast, which is entirely in Korean and combines spoken word with music.
The episodes were uploaded between February 20 and 23 this year and range between 3 minutes and 22 minutes long. There haven’t been any updates in the last month.
It’s classified in the “News and Politics” section of iTunes’ More >
Malware that hit South Korea wasn’t so sophisticated
Mar 21st
A cyber attack on three of South Korea’s major broadcasters and several of its major banks appears to have been caused by a relatively unsophisticated piece of software, security researchers said Wednesday. [Story updated, see below]
The attacks, which began at around 2pm local time on Wednesday (5:00 UTC) left desktop and laptop computers unable to start at KBS, MBC and YTN and took the auto-teller machines at Shinhan Bank and Nonghyup Bank offline. It didn’t affect the ability of the TV stations to put out programming.
The root of the attack was a malicious piece of software identified by computer security company Sophos More >
South Korea hit by coordinated cyber attack
Mar 20th
An apparently sophisticated and coordinated cyber attack has caused widespread disruption to computer networks and three of South Koreas largest broadcasters and two of the country’s banks.
The attack first showed itself at 2pm on Wednesday when computers at KBS, MBC and YTN shutdown. Upon restarting, the computers displayed error messages saying they were unable to boot. Apparently the boot record or entire operating system has been removed from the computers.
KBS broadcast images of computers in its offices showing an error screen and one KBS employee posted a picture of his laptop screen on Twitter (right.)
ATMs and online banking service at Shinhan More >
Root of Internet outage likely within DPRK, says researcher
Mar 19th
Last week’s Internet outage that pushed North Korean websites offline for almost two days was probably caused by a problem inside the country, not on an external connection, an Internet researcher said Monday.
“The impacted equipment was within North Korea,” said Doug Madory, a senior research engineer at Renesys. On Friday, he published a detailed look at the way the outage looked from the network level.
North Korea is connected to the Internet via two links and because the problems were observed on both connections, it stands to reason the problem was on the North Korean side, he said.
Data traffic instability on both More >
DPRK’s Internet outage lasted almost two days
Mar 16th
The Internet disruption that affected North Korea’s Internet link earlier this week lasted almost two days, an Internet monitoring company said Friday.
It began just before 0100 GMT on Wednesday — that’s 10am local time — and continued for much of the next day and a half. It then took several hours for traffic levels and response times to get back to normal, said Internet network monitoring company Renesys.
The country typically relies on a link via China Unicom to connect to the rest of the world and this disappeared from global routing tables when the outage began, said Renesys. Routing tables are constantly More >
KCNA accuses US, allies of cyberattacks
Mar 15th
North Korea’s state-run news agency accused the U.S. and its allies of being behind a series of cyberattacks that have forced its web sites offline for much of the last two days.
“Intensive and persistent virus attacks are being made every day on internet servers operated by the DPRK. These cannot be construed otherwise than despicable and base acts of the hostile forces consternated by the toughest measures taken by the DPRK after launching an all-out action,” the news agency said in a commentary.
The report represents the first recognition by North Korean state media of the cyberattacks.
The handful of web sites More >
Internet problems due to attack, says ITAR TASS
Mar 14th
Russia’s ITAR TASS news agency says problems experienced on Wednesday connecting to North Korean web sites was down to a cyberattack. [Updated, see below]
The report, which is datelined from Pyongyang, is just two sentences long and offers no evidence or details for the assertion. It’s credited to an unnamed and unidentified “informed source.”
“Internet resources of the country have come under a powerful hacker attack from abroad,” the news agency reported.
The lack of information makes it difficult to weigh the claim and the unwillingness of the source to go on-record adds a doubt.
In the past South Korea has quickly blamed North Korea for More >
