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.
They have access to the outside world. They have limited access to the western world, but there was a whole faculty at the university I went to there with many other foreigners. Plenty of students study foreign language and international studies. They have plenty of western-style restaurants, I had pretty good pizza there, just not all of the precious brand names.
These people always act like the DPRK is some kind of tribal village that has no contact with the rest of the planet. If you suddenly open up the internet to them, it wouldn’t be the massive culture shock that westerners think. There would be surprising things, sure, but it wouldn’t blow their mind.
Actually, quite the opposite. They are excellent IT workers really. I am in that field and there has been instances recently of companies hiring remote contract workers to later find out they are actually from the DPRK. They don’t do anything malicious, they just do good work. The only issue is the company could possibly end up in violation of sanctions, or they probably wouldn’t care.
Wow, what an elite brave hacker. He…performed a DDOS attack. What a regular Crash Override, I hope he put on his typing gloves before attempting such a fearsome hack.
DDOS attack a day keeps a boot on my face!
Brother worked with the letter agencies, no wonder he is like this.