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).<p>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.<p>I have no idea if this information is still or ever was completely true though.<p>There's a somewhat dated but very interesting AMA on Reddit by an American teaching computer science in Pyongyang:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ucl11/iama_american_who_spent_the_fall_teaching/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ucl11/iama_american_...</a><p>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.
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."<p>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.
This is my assumption as well. In general it seems like hacking becomes a lot easier (still not <i>easy</i> of course, just easier) when you have no fear of getting caught or going to jail.<p>Does anyone remember LAPSUS$ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsus$" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsus$</a> 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.
Probably helps that the stance is likely "Hack this target or your family dies". That's always pretty uhhhh motivational.
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.<p>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?<p>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.
Maybe they hire international talent.
[dead]
[flagged]
How cunning and evil it is that America funded the internet and then allowed it to spread around the world.<p>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.
The Roman Empire built lots of roads wherever they went and the British Empire built lots of rail networks.
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. Gaul already had a road system, and the Greek and Egyptian spheres did too.
> <i>Roman Empire merely improved roads in many places</i><p>/s? This is literally a Monty Python sketch.
Like most Python material that ceased to be funny decades ago thanks to people quoting it endlessly...<p>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.<p>Romanes eunt domum indeed.
> <i>Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians</i><p>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.<p>Nobody is saying the Romans came across <i>terra nullis</i>. But describing their engineering and culture as "merely improving roads" is silly.
>The Roman Empire merely improved roads in many places.<p>why did they invest in those roads? They weren't a charity.
“allowed” is doing a hell of a lot of work for monopoly capitalism backed by us state diplomacy<p>you may want to read this book about the military history of the internet originating in counter insurgency strategy in vietnam.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-Internet/dp/1610398025" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-...</a><p>another way to look at american internet penetration is as “radio free asia dot com”
a random interesting fact:<p>North Korea is responsible for adding the hot beverage, umbrella with raindrops, and lightning bolt emojis<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPS_9566" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPS_9566</a>
Thanks for sharing my site. Happy to answer any questions
Don't have questions, but your blog is very cool.<p>A bit over a decade ago I used to spend a lot of time hacking North Korean web infrastructure, I mostly found that they tended to have firewalling around almost all boxes exposed to the global internet and usually had pretty impressive reaction times if you tried to access the country intranet through a compromised web server.<p>I've always wondered how successful NSA and the likes have been at infiltrating DPRK networks, as it would inherently be fairly easy to detect any sketchy traffic from the outside. I wonder if the recent NYT story essentially confirms that difficulty.<p>Regarding the NSA and DPRK, there's this document from 2007 least <a href="https://www.eff.org/files/2015/02/03/20150117-spiegel-fifth_party_access_-_when_the_targeted_fourth_party_has_someone_under_surveillance_who_puts_others_under_surveillance.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/files/2015/02/03/20150117-spiegel-fifth_...</a><p>I guess I have a question after all: I'm not exactly clear on how NK treats end-user devices. Do you know if the endpoints used by NK based remote workers have internet and intranet access at the same time? If they do, such an endpoint could offer an easy and stealthy channel to access the intranet.
the end user devices are also really interesting. as far as i know they require a piece of software called netkey or oconnect as it's recently been renamed. that's for getting access inside the country and then for anyone outside they have software called hangro that is similar to a vpn for connecting back to north korea and getting messages
thanks really appreciate that!
I've seen that doc before and it does really make me wonder. part of the leaks from the NSA tools years back had some references in there for detecting north koreas ant-virus silivaccine<p><a href="https://github.com/b30wulf/Malware-collection/blob/4f5906c93314757e85f3e764d07c6b0466befbd8/malware/malware-master/Fuzzbunch/Resources/Ep/Scripts/PSP/silivaccine.eps#L22" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/b30wulf/Malware-collection/blob/4f5906c93...</a><p>There was also the hacking team leak from years ago and they were selling exploits for north korea's red star OS: <a href="https://nkinternet.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/portfolio.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://nkinternet.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/...</a><p>I assume they've been on their networks in the past but i think North Korea has also done a lot over the years to secure their side. it used to be a lot easier when they left everything as an open directory and didn't realize what they were doing.
>There was also the hacking team leak from years ago and they were selling exploits for north korea's red star OS: <a href="https://nkinternet.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/" rel="nofollow">https://nkinternet.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/</a>...<p>South Korean NIS was in fact a hacking team client, so it would make sense. Especially considering how terrible Red Star OS was at the time, a HT engineer could probably have whipped those up in a couple of days.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180302155452/http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/news/2015/08/04/0200000000AEN20150804000900315.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20180302155452/http://english.yo...</a><p>>I assume they've been on their networks in the past but i think North Korea has also done a lot over the years to secure their side. it used to be a lot easier when they left everything as an open directory and didn't realize what they were doing.<p>I'm sure they've had <i>some</i> success, but I'd expect it to be a really difficult environment to operate in. Even for the NSA. I suppose eventually there'll be a better leak and we'll get to find out just how well it's been going.
> this document from 2007<p>Interesting document - confirming "everyone spies on everyone". Is this from some sort of corporate NSA chat room?
It's like the NSA Reddit, they've got memes and up- and downvotes.<p>Some excerpts from a seemingly unreleased Snowden leak (from Dark mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State):<p>> “Why is a scoop of potatoes larger than a scoop of eggs in the cafeteria?” a contributor named Michael wondered one day. Paul jumped in to play the troll. “Let me be the first to down-vote you,” Paul wrote, naming several pedantic reasons. A side debate erupted: should Michael’s post be down-voted, flagged, or removed? Clyde returned to the topic at hand with a facetious theory that scoop volume is proportional to the relative size of potatoes and eggs themselves. In that case, Scott replied, what would happen if “we served eggs that were bigger than potatoes, like of an Ostrich?” Someone proposed a uniform system, “One Spoon to scoop them all,” an homage to Lord of the Rings. Punsters demanded the “inside scoop” and lamented the waste of time on “small potatoes.”<p>Gotta say, it's pretty disappointing that Gellman, Greenwald, Poltras et. al. have been so stingy with these documents. It's definitely starting to have been long enough for them to just dump everything.
Impressive sleuthing!<p>It's interesting to discover the reality that packet routing ends up following political affiliations. I didn't know North Korea only has 1,024 IPv4 addresses. Do you know why so few IPs? How did they get them?
> It's interesting to discover the reality that packet routing ends up following political affiliations.<p>Certainly political affiliations have some influence, but also China and Russia have land borders with North Korea and are not at war. It's <i>very</i> common to run fiber optic on/under railroads and vehicle roads, so there you go. It's probably pretty hard to attract an international cable consortium to land in North Korea given everything, but terrestrial cabling is easier to start with anyway.<p>> I didn't know North Korea only has 1,024 IPv4 addresses. Do you know why so few IPs? How did they get them?<p>They would have asked APNIC, the Regional Internet address Registry for their region (Asia-Pacific). I can't find an assignment date, but 175/8 was assigned to APNIC in 2009. 2009 lines up with wikipedia reporting of the startup of the current ISP joint venture.
DPRK can certainly get however many IP addresses they want, DPRK just doesn't have that much infrastructure that they want externally accessible.<p>As far as I know, end-user traffic from within North Korea usually does not originate from those few IP addresses. Or at least not visibly so, they might be connecting to a proxy from a DPRK IP address.
What a great read. Thanks.
[dead]
Do those small utility boxes alongside the tracks make sense for fiber optic? I expected things like that to be larger, if only because fiber has a minimum bend radius.<p>Edit: Good article though, I enjoyed it a lot.
The min bend radius isn’t that large in my experience. On the order of 10cm IIRC, possibly even less.
Even less is correct: outdoor fibers (G.652.D) have a minimum bend radius of about 30mm. The indoor counterpart (G.657.A1 and A2) have 10mm and 7.5mm.
Much smaller than that, some might even say a utility box is overkill: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupportgore/comments/nvwcuh/the_fiber_line_coming_into_my_village_in_korea/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupportgore/comments/nvwcuh/the...</a>
Fiber’s perfectly happy being joined in 12” by 16” boxes for small runs. The terminal box in my garage has a few loops and is more like 6” x 8”.<p><a href="https://www.seeclearfield.com/fiber-optic-wall-box/metal-wall-boxes/outdoor-wall-panels.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.seeclearfield.com/fiber-optic-wall-box/metal-wal...</a>
Isn't it easier to hang optic cable on the poles? It seems that burying the cable requires more work.<p>As for utility boxes along the track, it could be something railway-related, for example, some railway control or monitoring equipment.
A few inches of dirt protects against cables darkening from nuclear blasts, if you care about that sort of thing.
If you hang your fibre optic cable from poles, you will inevitably evolve flying backhoes.
They are too vulnerable to the elements there.
I found the railroad part of the article unpersuasive. Optical repeater stations are fairly large and therefore wouldn't show up as random small underground vaults or little boxes on poles. These look like a collection of pictures of train tracks with no particular indicators of optical cables therein.
Can we back up and just recognize how insane North Korea is? I think that future generations will look back on our history and wonder why nobody ever did anything about the incredible atrocities that took place in that country for <i>decades</i>.
At least NK's human rights abuses are contained within their borders. I hope future generations will look back on the many US invasions of foreign countries over the years and all the war crimes that took place during those invasions with the scrutiny they deserve.
I will get buried for saying this, but DPRK survived as a people, investing everything into a nuclear program to survive. The reason nobody did anything is they firmly built a defense against intervention, and given how the korean war went, how various US interventions looked after that, it was the correct thing to do. The most the US could do to them in recent years was murder some innocent fishermen. It has tried to starve them and failed.
Except we aren't blameless either for the state North Korea ended up in. We leveled nearly every building in the country, we even targeted rural thatch huts with bombing runs. We dropped so many bombs on North Korea that the bombers started dropping bombs on thrice bombed rubble and open land because they couldn't find any targets left to attack. Why should we be surprised that a strong arm authoritarian leadership rose up among the chaos and put every effort towards military power and obtaining nuclear weapons at the expense of everything else?<p>I can't even say that they made the wrong decision either, North Korea still exists as an independent nation which is amazing in itself.
North Korea is a buffer state and continues to exist because of China.
It will definitely go down as one of the biggest failures of mankind. Especially since it was so easily preventable if MacArthur was permitted to just take the whole peninsula.
Or how about us not blowing them to bits in the first place? South Korea was on the very edge of capitulation before the US came in full force and even most South Korean citizens were in support of Korean unification at that time. The current state of North Korea would have never come to reality if they hadn't been blown to bits by the US because of big ol' scary "communism".
Think how many tens of millions could have been saved if we had ended the Soviet Union as Churchill advocated, before the world got nukes.
Does any serious historian believe that fully defeating the Soviet Union after WWII would have been possible? Even with the advantage of nuclear weapons, I doubt the US would have made it very far.
Think how many tens of millions would have died in such a war. Just for some other evil to pop up anyway.
You mean when Churchill wanted to hire 100,000 "former" Nazis to invade the Soviet Union?
China was already sending troops and material to the front lines when MacArthur was ordered to stand down. Pushing further would have meant a hot war with China.
You know the US destroyed nearly 75 percent of all buildings in North Korea during the Korean War, right?<p>NK is paranoid for very valid reasons.
[dead]