Posts tagged Star JV
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 >
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 >
The Pirate Bay says it’s gone to North Korea
Mar 5th
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more bizarre than Dennis Rodman hugging Kim Jong Un, the operators of The Pirate Bay site claimed Monday that they are now running from the North Korean Internet.
The Pirate Bay is one of the Internet’s longest surviving pirate sites. It links to Bit Torrent files of thousands of movies, TV shows, songs and other multimedia and is a major thorn in the side of the commercial content industry. The actual pirated content is located on user machines, but the main website acts as a sort of index to all these bits of More >
DPRK gets second link to Internet
Apr 8th
North Korea no longer relies on a single foreign telecom company to carry its Internet traffic to and from the rest of the world.
Ever since Star Joint Venture launched the country’s first fully-fledged Internet connection in 2010, North Korean traffic has flowed across the country’s northern border and through an interconnection with China Netcom. China Netcom is one of China’s largest Internet backbone providers.
In the last few days the country’s sole Internet operator has begun using an interconnection with Intelsat, the Washington-based international satellite operator, to offer a second route to its network.
Existence of the link was revealed through analysis 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 >
More details on Star Joint Venture
May 19th
A couple of new details about Star JV, the company now responsible for North Korea’s connection to the global Internet, came to light this week.
They were included in a report from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) about the reassignment of the country’s dot-kp domain to Star JV.
The report reveals the mission of the company and its president:
Proposed Sponsoring Organisation and Contacts
The proposed sponsoring organisation is Star Joint Venture Company, based in Pyongyang, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The company is a joint venture between the Korean Post and Telecommunications Corporation, a governmental enterprise; and Loxley Pacific Company Limited. The More >
KP domain switch came after KCC Europe disappeared
May 19th
North Korea’s dot-kp top-level Internet domain was reassigned after the company running it, KCC Europe, ended service and went months without replying to queries from Pyongyang, according to a report released this week.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which oversees country-level domains and the IP address system, switched control of dot-kp from the Korea Computer Center to Star Joint Venture earlier this month. Star JV is the DPRK-Thai company that’s been putting Internet connectivity into Pyongyang.
The story of the domain change and what happened with KCC Europe is covered in a piece I wrote earlier today: North Korea’s Internet domain is More >
Dot KP domain assigned to Star
May 3rd
Control of North Korea’s dot-KP Internet top-level domain has been assigned to Star JV, the North Korean-Thai joint venture that’s behind the recent wiring of Pyongyang to the global Internet.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which administers country code domains, updated its database on Monday, May 2, to assign the KP domain to “Star Joint Venture Company.”
This means control for the KP domain now rests with Star JV. Star took control of North Korea’s Internet address space last year and has been building up the North Korean Internet.
Switch of control to Star doesn’t come as a surprise as the company started More >
FNK Radio attracts North Korean Internet audience
Jan 18th
Free North Korea Radio, one of the handful of independent broadcasters targeting North Korea, attracted a direct connection to its website from inside the DPRK on Wednesday morning.
The site said an incoming connection from North Korea was recorded between 9:30am and 10am on Wednesday morning. It included the following screenshot (see below) from its site showing a connection from what appears to be within the North Korean IP address range that’s recently been activated by Star JV.
Star’s IP addresses run from 175.45.176.0 to 175.45.179.255.
Free North Korea Radio, based in Seoul and run by defectors from the north, broadcasts programming critical of More >
Dot-KP domain names are back
Jan 11th
North Korea’s Dot-KP domain name system returned to the Internet in the last few days. (See the bottom of this post for updates.)
Offline for months, the service has resumed via servers run by Star JV, the Internet joint venture formed by the North Korean government and Thailand’s Loxley Pacific. As reported previously, dot-kp was run by the KCC Europe operation in Germany but went offline in the third quarter of last year.
Two websites are already available via KP domain names. Both are hosted on the same web server. The first, Naenara, has been available for a few months via an More >
