North Korea Introduces 'Secure' E-mail

An anonymous reader sent in a strange little story running over at ZD that discusses North Korea's new secure email system. There's a lot of strange bits in there about trained North Korean hackers, and the fact that North Korea's news agency is hosted in Japan.

Comments

The North Korean News Agency

[s20451]

http://www.kcna.co.jp

Pretty funny. A lot of stories like, "Ugandan ambassador hails Korean workers". Even some news in Spanish (I wonder if that's for Cuban benefit.)

You know why its site is run from Japan right?

[sielwolf]

Because they can't risk having such a honeypot inside the DMZ (heh, check out how the computer argot just got completely flipped back upon itself). You don't want those loyal Party North Koreans (who would run such a service) allowing even the chance of Southern/US propaganda entering the North.

Better to isolate it outside and communicate with it securely. Would any self-respecting BOFH run his tyrannical regime er network any other way (bad haircut optioal)?

Also note that a segement of Korean-Japanese (who are descendent from the bad ol' days when the Penninsula was a colony) still see the North Korean regime as the One True way (so getting help to run Il-Jong's isn't too hard). Interesting article on the subject can be found in this JE. It's about an American's vacation into the North. Fascinating.

Should have just bought PGP-Universal

[Nonesuch]

All that work, and they could have just installed one of these on the DMZ and been done with it.

PGP.Com products are notoriously overpriced, but I bet North Korea could negotiate a nice discount on a 22,000,000 seat license with A.T.M. Networks Inc, the South Korean sales agent...

One hitch -- I tried completing the "free download" form with "N.Korea" as the country code, and got this popup:

'In accordance with current US Export restrictions, PGP 8.0 products may be downloaded by individuals throughout the world except those in the following countries: Cuba, Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. If you are in one of these countries, you may not download PGP software'."

Ah well, GPG doesn't have these petty restrictions!

I hope South Korea is secure

[AndroidCat]

A year ago or more, I received a "Meet Russian Vommin" spam -- relayed by an open proxy on the firewall box of the South Korea naval headquarters. It took days to find a working Korean abuse mailbox to report this to.

Hopefully they've improved things since then.