North Korea appears to have new Internet connection – thanks to state-owned Russian firm
A state-owned Russian telecommunications firm has given North Korea a new internet connection – potentially increasing Pyongyang’s ability to stage cyberattacks and helping protect the embattled country’s internet infrastructure.
The new connection was first spotted by internet analysts at Dyn Research, who noted that a new connection for North Koreans provided by the Russian firm TransTeleCom appeared in Internet routing databases at about 5:38 p.m. Pyongyang time Sunday.
The new connection appears to supplement a previously existing connection run by China Unicom that has been in operation since 2010. With two connections, experts argue, North Korean internet users could expect a higher international bandwidth capacity and greater resilience to attacks.
“(The new connection) will improve the resiliency of their network and increase their ability to conduct command and control over those activities,” Bryce Boland, FireEye’s chief technology office for the Asia-Pacific region, told Reuters.
On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that a U.S. Cyber Command operation had been targeting hackers in North Korea’s military spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau. The U.S. operation had worked by using what is known as a denial of service attack, choking off access to the internet for North Korean users. It had ended Saturday, shortly before North Korea’s new internet connection went online.
Martyn Williams, an expert on North Korean technology who first reported on the new connection at the website 38 North, wrote that “relying on one internet provider has always left North Korea in a precarious situation.” In 2014, after a cyberattack on Sony Pictures that was widely attributed to North Korea, the country suddenly lost its connection to the internet, an incident many suspected of being a U.S. retaliation.
TransTeleCom is part of Russian Railway Corp., a huge state-owned infrastructure and transport company formerly headed by Vladimir Yakunin – a U.S.-sanctioned former KGB agent considered a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Though Yakunin was reportedly ousted in 2015, the organization still has deep ties to the Russian government and the president in particular, experts say.
“This means that the opening of the connection has Russian government backing behind it,” said Andrei Soldatov, co-author of the book “The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries.”
TransTeleCom did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesman for the company told the Financial Times that it has a long relationship with the Pyongyang and had “historically had a backbone network interface with North Korea under an agreement with Korea Posts and Telecommunications Corp. struck in 2009.”
U.S. officials say that as China has increased economic pressure on North Korea in line with U.N. sanctions, Russian entrepreneurs have stepped into the gap – quietly undermining sanctions with illicit trade and smuggling.