Man who briefly took down North Korea’s Internet posts on r/AMA, some of the questions include:
Would it be possible to hack their internet in such a way that you could have opened a pipeline from their limited NK-only intranet to the outside internet? Or is that so walled off that it wouldn’t be feasible? Giving citizens access to the outside world would be an interesting thing to see them deal with.
To which he answered:
That would be amazing. It’s definitely a huge goal of mine. I’d say it should be possible. But it may be somewhat difficult depending on their setup. From what i’ve seen they aren’t great at setting stuff up, so I’m absolutely going to try!
You allegdedly committed a cyber crime, and we’ve seen “good hackers” get punished for their good deeds before.
Do you have any concerns that you’ll be targeted by authorities?
To which he answered:
Actually the US government was far far more a concern than NK. However now I’ve done work in the space of sort of what they called “guerrilla/unconventional warfare” for folks in the DoD because of this. I’m also working with the folks that would be the ones arresting me and they gave me a nice unofficial commendation (a challenge coin if you’re familiar). I suppose there are other entities that could come after me but I think it’s tough to, I don’t know. But will there be a legal case of “North Korea vs P4x”? Who would take that on even! We don’t even consider NK a country, they’re a terrorist state officially. So I hit back at a bunch of terrorists that attacked me. I probably broke some international shit but 🤷.
Was there anything you learned about NK while you were bringing down the house?
To which he answered:
They suck at Internet. Their internet is little sticks and glue. Even better though, I learned they have only two routers of egress and ingress of the Internet. What I eventually ended up doing was focusing a lot of bandwidth on those routers . It took down all routing into and out of the country. Along with conventional DoS like memory exhaustion and just a lot of bandwidth hitting them, when those two routers came down it was game over.
It wasn’t just a DoS on their infra, it actually took down all routing. The errors people got were “there is no route to host” which was awesome to see honestly!
Those are only some of the comments, those that went against the narrative of “North Korea evil 1984” were expected ly downvoted.
Yeah Americans truly, honestly believe that the DPRK is 1984. They listen to Yeonmi Park speak and they say “yeah that sounds right.” They think that the people there worship Kim Jong-Un as a literal god and that they’re all starving all the time (and that that’s because the evil government employees are all 9000 pounds from eating all the country’s food maliciously and not because of the deliberate and explicit efforts by the US-aligned states to starve them). They think that no one there has ever seen any form of artwork that wasn’t evil insidious propaganda about Kim the God, and that no one in the country has ever lived a “normal” day in their life.
None of this is even the slightest exaggeration, this is what literally 99% of Americans who think they know anything about the DPRK fully believe.
Is it appropriate to call this line of thinking “orientalist?” Because thats what it feels like. With how active the DPRK is becoming nowadays I can only hope that the propaganda loses steam as more people realize that it’s just a normal country under a shit load of sanctions. It may just be my side of the internet but I’m seeing a lot more people brushing off Yeonmi Park as a liar and a joke, so thats cool.
In any case I hope one day in the near future I’ll be able to visit.
Americans will believe anything about foreigners that you tell them. There is no amount of educating that will fix it unfortunately. The solution is making Americans irrelevant in global politics. I mean the people largely are anyways, they are just cheerleaders at the Superbowl.