Sure it was a correct thing for Kims to do, millions of Koreans be damned.
America bombed North Korea back to the stone age. Now we in the West wonder why it’s so F’d up by its very own volition.
[1]: This is not to say that North Korean propaganda is not real.
NK is paranoid for very valid reasons.
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.
Why in that country ? US controls much of western opinion and made a lot of atrocities, yet, nobody cares (see the ongoing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_military_st... )
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
The world doesnt make sense if you ignore history.
They probably hack for the same reason the west does it: attack/defense and money.
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.
If you only met the world on American TV, yes.
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.
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.
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.
Regarding the NSA and DPRK, there's this document from 2007 least https://www.eff.org/files/2015/02/03/20150117-spiegel-fifth_...
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.
https://github.com/b30wulf/Malware-collection/blob/4f5906c93...
There was also the hacking team leak from years ago and they were selling exploits for north korea's red star OS: https://nkinternet.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/...
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.
Interesting document - confirming "everyone spies on everyone". Is this from some sort of corporate NSA chat room?
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?
Certainly political affiliations have some influence, but also China and Russia have land borders with North Korea and are not at war. It's very 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.
> I didn't know North Korea only has 1,024 IPv4 addresses. Do you know why so few IPs? How did they get them?
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.
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's your source for that number? Is it GBit or GByte? Are they building out OTU1?
As for utility boxes along the track, it could be something railway-related, for example, some railway control or monitoring equipment.
Also, installing general telco fibre next to railway lines is standard practice. Makes all the bureaucracy so much easier if you can just use the existing railway right-of-way. Not that the DPRK would care much about right-of-way ;D
Edit: Good article though, I enjoyed it a lot.
https://www.seeclearfield.com/fiber-optic-wall-box/metal-wal...
North Korea is responsible for adding the hot beverage, umbrella with raindrops, and lightning bolt emojis
also a ditch witch and couple of support vehicles could run cable through most terrain, and in agrairian areas , not needing permits and such, would be indistinguisashable from other activity ,happen very quickly, and leave no trace
humanity has reached the point where our comunications net is a given for 90%+ of the population centers in one form or another, and if not for the slop, would have an order of magnitude, excess capacity. throw in peer to peer ,and the soon to be blanket coverage from sattelite swarms, and well, what? sonar relays for underwater, and seizmo transmitters
