Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

My understanding is that there are three mobile networks in North Korea: the normal one used by the citizens (they have smartphones made specifically for North Korea), one used by the government/military and one for tourists (requires a local SIM card only available in a specific hotel in Pyongyang).

The last one is connected to the internet and this is why you can see (or at least before the pandemic could see) Instagram posts from North Korea.

I have no idea if this information is still or ever was completely true though.

There's a somewhat dated but very interesting AMA on Reddit by an American teaching computer science in Pyongyang:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ucl11/iama_american_...

Reading about the internet knowledge possessed by North Korean students, I'm always surprised how they supposedly also manage to be some of the most cunning and evil actors when it comes to hacking.

How cunning and evil it is that America funded the internet and then allowed it to spread around the world.

If you're worried about "absolute control over digital systems", notice how many standards get published describing how those digital systems work -- you're welcome to reimplement them if you'd like more control.

“allowed” is doing a hell of a lot of work for monopoly capitalism backed by us state diplomacy

you may want to read this book about the military history of the internet originating in counter insurgency strategy in vietnam.

https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-...

another way to look at american internet penetration is as “radio free asia dot com”

The Roman Empire built lots of roads wherever they went and the British Empire built lots of rail networks.

The Roman Empire merely improved roads in many places. Gaul already had a road system, and the Greek and Egyptian spheres did too.

What I'm saying is this: there's nothing stopping you from using communication methods that aren't controlled by Americans. All of the protocols that the internet uses are documented.

>The Roman Empire merely improved roads in many places.

why did they invest in those roads? They weren't a charity.

Re: "I'm always surprised how they supposedly also manage to be some of the most cunning and evil actors when it comes to hacking."

I sort of suspect this is just the result of a nation state that is willing to be a pariah. That is, I think nearly any large state could do it if they didn't mind burning bridges.

It’s not just that they don’t care about being a pariah state, it’s a literal fund raising exercise, unlike most other state sanctioned hacking.

> Roman Empire merely improved roads in many places

/s? This is literally a Monty Python sketch.

This is exactly what China and North Korea do shrug but they get a lot of criticism for it.

Like most Python material that ceased to be funny decades ago thanks to people quoting it endlessly...

The Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians, and claimed they lived in wastelands. The truth is more complex. In many places — yes, including Judaea — they inherited infrastructure and buildings. Judaea was previously occupied by the Greeks and a number of other civilisations had left behind remains. The idea that it was terra nullis or a tabula rasa is nonsense. Even Gaul which was considered to be a frontier already had a road system (some of which has been only rediscovered in recent times), and what is now Marseilles was a Greek city going way back before the Roman conquest.

Romanes eunt domum indeed.

So that they could move troops and goods from one place to another.

Probably helps that the stance is likely "Hack this target or your family dies". That's always pretty uhhhh motivational.

Maybe they hire international talent.

This is my assumption as well. In general it seems like hacking becomes a lot easier (still not easy of course, just easier) when you have no fear of getting caught or going to jail.

Does anyone remember LAPSUS$ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsus$ from a while back? It was reported for a while that it was largely made up of teenagers, and it seems two did get caught. I recall their whole MO being brazen social engineering/using stolen credentials in a way that got them caught pretty quickly, but also got results fast.

Yes, and more specifically so they could move resources back to Rome.

Hire is not always the correct word. There is evidence they acquire international talent without consent.

> Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians

The Romans also aggressively appropriated from and integrated the people they conquered, extending the concept of citizenship and thus what it meant to be Roman in the process.

Nobody is saying the Romans came across terra nullis. But describing their engineering and culture as "merely improving roads" is silly.

Why would they need such incentives? All they gotta do is give them a decent wage and they will be happy, which in North Korea is a paltry sum. Its not like regular North Koreans are traveling around the world, they couldn't afford it even without any other restrictions, so they have zero risk of arrest or punishment from other nations.

If I told you today that I will pay you a million dollars to go fuck around with some North Korean servers, and doing it completely anonymously with the full protection and sanction of your government, would you say no?

I think you may have some unrealistic views on how North Korea operates internally. 99% of their population lives completely normal lives and has zero extra interactions with the government beyond basic grunt military service which is common across much of the world, and paperwork for licensing, permits, and taxes. We only see the worst possible views of North Korea from the outside, slathered with thick layers of additional propaganda on top of it.

"Pariah", they've had the longest embargo on earth (which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths), they had 90% of their whole countries infrastructure bombed by the US, and the Korean war has been called a genocide in the North by many scholars.

The world doesnt make sense if you ignore history.

They probably hack for the same reason the west does it: attack/defense and money.

>one for tourists (requires a local SIM card only available in a specific hotel in Pyongyang).

I do not think that exists. I imagine the diplomats and other foreigners living there will have this, though.

When I was there two times (in Pyongyang, and in villages in the north east & Rason) any access to the outside world was prohibited via a network other than telephone (I could make outgoing phone calls via the hotel). Even traveling very close to the border (which they use jammers to block outside connections), my guides were annoyed when they saw I was trying to connect to the Chinese network from my phone.

The only place I saw any access "to the outside world" was in Rason (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rason_Special_Economic_Zone), where one of the casinos had a computer which could be used to access the internet (through the Chinese GFW, of course).

> That's always pretty uhhhh motivational

If you only met the world on American TV, yes.

What other options do they have? They've been sanctioned to the point where they have few options left but to turn to crime.

Rome was entirely reliant upon the looting and expansion of the empire to support them. Without building up those roads Rome would have starved and fallen apart.

They stole literature and architecture from the Greeks, chariot building techniques from the Gauls, their identity from the Etruscans and Latins, and probably more than they would ever admit to from the Carthaginians.

When I was growing up we were taught the Romans' own imperial myth that they had built upon nothing. The Monty Python film even promotes that as a joke. There are cities in the Holy Land like Jericho which were inhabited before Rome was even founded.

p.s. Do I get downvotes for pointing out archaeological and historical fact here? When I said "merely improved roads", I was talking about their road network not their entire civilisation.

"I'm always surprised how they supposedly also manage to be some of the most cunning and evil actors when it comes to hacking"

This sentiment is probably overblown. The fact that they are effectively robbing people to earn some money for their pathetic regime means only that they are on the level of nowadays internet scammers. They are good at that too.

Spending enough money (and they spend a lot - 26 million people work only for this) one can train people to do this or hire people to do this for them.

Their brutal dictatorship is a choice.

See also Russian hackers being notorious simply because Russia is willing to turn a blind eye to cyber crime that doesn't target Russia

Crime being illegal doesn't prevent crime, but it adds an enormous amount of friction. In the West if you are decent at hacking, low-level APIs or reverse engineering you could turn to cyber crime. But if you instead get a regular job in cyber security or software engineering you still get a good salary, and don't have to worry about your online friends being police informants, can tell your potential significant other what you do to earn a living, get money wired directly to your bank account instead of having to go through costly intermediaries with significant risks, don't have trouble with the tax authority, etc.

If you reduce the legal opportunities and remove the downsides of the illegal ones the calculation completely changes, and with it the talent pool

Completely normal lives may be stretching your speech a bit too far. They provably had hundreds of thousands of deaths in famines when surrounding countries thrived, they have absolutely horrendous concentration camps where people are frequently beaten to death for small infractions and whole families are sent there, including small children (who also get beaten to death by their 'teachers').

If you consider numerous reports of people that managed to barely escape and report this consistently in the west as pure propaganda, thats... your paranoid mindset. Sometimes people and regimes are simply evil, 21st century is in no way immune to that.

tragically, this is exactly what it is

Isn't the whole point of a dictatorship that you don't get to choose?

That's my point :-) , people in the thread are acting like their hegemony enablement technology is a selfless gift.

> They stole

They learned and appropriated. People and cultures that think anything foreign is evil don’t tend to advance.

The Romans weren’t some progressive legend. But they integrated and distributed knowledge and technology expertly, and were genuine innovators in their chief technology, that of scaled administration.

> When I was growing up we were taught the Romans' own imperial myth that they had built upon nothing

Why do you think this says anything about the Romans versus the context in which you were educated? Is there a single historical source from Republican, Imperial or Eastern Rome you can point to that claims Rome was built on nothing (other than the founding of Rome)?

They identified as conquerors. You don’t get a triumph for shooing some goats off a hill.

All empires collapse eventually.

Any sources for these numerous reports of teachers beating small children to death beyond "trust me bro?"

I couldn't find any sources for widespread beatings of children to death by teachers.

>Ahn noted that prisoners detained in the punishment chambers were often crippled after three months and dead within five months. Ahn and other former guards have testified to the brutality that they were encouraged to demonstrate while punishing prisoners. Former guards have confessed that they were taught not to view prisoners as humans. However, the number of deaths from beating prisoners was so high that at one point, the guards were encouraged to be less violent. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Prisons-of-...

>One inmate recalls that as a 10-year-old he was told to lift a 30kg sack of earth (more than his own body weight) 30 times a day. If he slipped he was beaten with sticks by his teachers. Kang Cheol-hwan (former Yodok inmate. He was detained with family as a young boy). Here called: The work was too much for me or for any child of my age. But I did not dare to complain. After the first ten rounds, my legs started shaking, my body was hurting and my shoulder skin was peeling off. I was near collapse but the teachers were watching us and beating us with sticks if we stopped.”

>Kang Cheol-hwan also recalls deaths of children who were working at a work site. “The children in my class were ordered to dig and move earth to a work site 200 metres away. Twelve children dug holes with shovels and the other children carried the dirt in sacks or buckets. The dig site was a clay hill and the clay was quite soft. But we were afraid that as we dug deeper, it could collapse at any time. The teachers who were supervising us told the children to keep digging. After three days, the hill suddenly collapsed. There were six children who were on top of the hill when it collapsed. Three children were killed and the other three were badly injured. However, the teachers blamed the children for the carelessness.”

>Between the ages of 13 and 16, Shin recalled: “I was forced to undertake dangerous work and saw many children killed in work. Sometimes, four to five children were killed in a day. On one occasion, I saw eight people killed by an accident. Three men were working high up on a tall cement wall, three 15-year-old girls and two boys were helping them with mortar below. I was carrying mortar to the children when I saw the cement wall falling. Eight were buried under many tons of mortar; there was no rescue. Instead, the security officers told us not to stop work.” https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/asa240...

>Security officials armed with machine guns gathered together all the political prisoners at the camp to witness the hanging of the two adults and the execution by firing squad of the three children.

>“Interviews were conducted with 35 defectors who had escaped from various detention facilities in the preceding 18-month period, and 31 of them testified to having witnessed the killing of newborns.” https://web.archive.org/web/20141006072142/https://www.kinu....