With North Korea threatening others with nuclear annihilation, the hackivist group Anonymous is taking the fight to North Korea. The Guy Fawkes-masked cyber-vigilantes, better known for selectively attacking governments, financial institutions, pedophiles, religious groups, and even a Mexican drug cartel, started their “Operation Free Korea” campaign at the beginning of this month. In the first [...]

Read full post

We offer the following from the 11 October 2012 (we won’t bother to translate into juche-time) Minju Joson, a North Korean government newspaper, without editorial comment: The United States Raised the Curtain on a Cyber Armament Race “The United States is going into full swing on cyber armament development lately. According to news reports, the US [...]

Read full post

This summer Leonid Petrov characterized cyber-warfare as North Korea’s most “cost-effective way of intimidating the South.” South Korea is responding to the threat by bolstering external defenses and tightening internal controls. Earlier this year one South Korean ministry announced a strategy that emphasizes quality over quantity. According to a report in Dong-A Ilbo, “The government [...]

Read full post

A potentially major driver in North Korean societal change has been the regime’s eroding control over information.  South Korea recently upgraded from analog to digital television broadcasts meaning loss of access by residents of North Korea’s Gangwon province.  An unnamed source from the province told Daily NK last Sunday, “Those people who used to watch South [...]

Read full post

I’m not sure even David Frum still believes in the “Axis of Evil” but with Syria stepping into the void left by Iraq, Iran-North Korea-Syria cooperation is back in the news. Multiple press sources describe US pressure on Iraq to block North Korean and Iranian planes, thought to carry North Korean arms, from entering Syria. [...]

Read full post

According to the NIS, North Korea launches 250 million intrusions against South Korean entities each day.  A few last cyber-related stories from the summer that caught my eye: From the outsourcing reaches the Korean peninsula department, foxes guarding the chicken coop branch: Maria Kim at the Committee for Human Rights for North Korea sent along [...]

Read full post

Earlier I wrote a piece on the rising costs of unification.  According to Yonhap, the South Korean government continues to putter away on its “unification tax” proposal.  Maybe we should import some National Assembly members to serve in the House of Representatives… It never ends:   South Korea’s Maeil Business news is reporting that 35 million [...]

Read full post

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a very interesting discussion on how can social media and the Internet be deployed to maximize civic engagement in Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, as part of the conference “How to Ignite, or Quash, a Revolution in 140 Characters or Less “sponsored by the “Future Tense” [...]

Read full post

On 5 July, the software security firm McAfee released a report arguing that March denial of service attacks against South Korean and US websites were a kind of cyber reconnaissance mission by North Korea or its sympathizers aimed at testing defenses. (Dmitri Alperovitch, who led the McAfee team, was less circumspect in interviews, fingering North [...]

Read full post

Friday, the Washington Post published its annual summer concert guide. Flipping through the listings (who knew Pat Benatar still toured?) got me to thinking about musically themed news items….  Hit Me With Your Best Shot (Pat Benatar):  Friday KCNA carried the North Korean military’s response to the recent incident in which images of Kim Jong-il and [...]

Read full post