The effect of sanctions on North Korea

Experts believe that sanctions on North Korea were likely to have little effect—which is already under several international penalties.

“How do you sanction the world’s most heavily sanctioned country?” said John Park, a Northeast Asia specialist at Harvard Kennedy School, adding that “every time you apply sanctions to a target, it forces them to innovate and get around sanctions.”

Other experts had suggested in December that the U.S. government might be able to hurt the regime in Pyongyang by attacking its international exposure—either those foreign firms operating in North Korea, or North Korean entities operating abroad.

This may account for the sanctioning of some of the officials with business ties to other countries, including Kil Jong Hun and Kim Kwang Yon, who the Treasury described as representing “the southern African interests of KOMID.”

Sanctioned groups include intelligence organization Reconnaissance General Bureau, Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation (which the Treasury called the country’s “primary arms dealer and main exporter of goods and equipment related to ballistic missiles and conventional weapon”), and defense industry-focused Korea Tangun Trading Corporation.

“The financial portion is what hurts them the most,” Jack Pritchard, who served as U.S. ambassador and special envoy for negotiations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from 2001 to 2003.

[CNBC]

US sanctions North Korea

President Obama has signed an executive order imposing new sanctions on North Korea following last month’s cyber-attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

In issuing the order, Obama accuses North Korea of “destructive, coercive cyber-related actions during November and December,” calling them a “continuing threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States.”

The order authorizes the Treasury Department to shutdown access to the U.S. financial system, prohibiting transactions and freezing assets, for specific North Korean officials and entities and anyone who supports them.

The Obama administration has identified more than a dozen targets of the sanctions – 3 North Korean agencies and 10 individuals – including the country’s primary intelligence agency that the administration believes runs their “major cyber operations.”

[ABC]

Internet service restored in North Korea

After more than nine hours and 30 minutes, Internet service has been restored in North Korea, according to technology news service Dyn Research. Access is only partial, Reuters reports, but the country’s main news service and newspaper both are back online.

North Korea’s Internet went offline days after President Obama pledged a “proportional response” to the communist country’s alleged hacking of Sony Pictures, multiple news reports say.

Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, told The New York Times and other news organizations that North Korea’s Internet access became unstable late Friday. By Monday, it was offline, he said.

It’s unclear what caused the outage, but State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said: “We aren’t going to discuss publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen.”

In an interview with NPR’s Elise Hu, Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare, pointed to four possible scenarios: North Korea turned off its own Internet; China’s upstream provider turned it off; the country’s routers failed at an unfortunate time; or it was the result of a denial-of-service attack from either a hacking group or the U.S.

[NPR]

What military chiefs worry about at night

Shortly before he retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I asked Adm. Mike Mullen what he saw on the ceiling on nights when he couldn’t sleep.

“Cyber,” he said.

That was 2011 and this is 2014, and it seems that Mullen’s ceiling has been moved to Sony Corp., which has been hacked, maybe by North Korea, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.

–Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist

The cyber army of North Korea Bureau 121

Somewhere deep inside North Korea is a cell of sophisticated cyber warriors known as Bureau 121. It is suspected to have carried out a series of other attacks against South Korean companies, and also possibly against Sony more recently. Cybersecurity researchers have said the Sony breach is similar to an attack against South Korean media and financial institutions last year that was attributed to North Korea.

A North Korean defector, Jang Se-yul, told Reuters that Bureau 121 consists of roughly 1,800 hackers, who live a relatively pampered life as elites in the country’s military.

“For them, the strongest weapon is cyber. In North Korea, it’s called the Secret War,” Jang told Reuters. But while members of Bureau 121 are reportedly handpicked from the reclusive nation’s technical university programs, the rest of the country is largely cut off from the online world outside of North Korea.

Given the increasingly digital nature of warfare in the world, it makes economic sense for North Korea to pour resources in entities such as Bureau 121. On the digital battlefield attackers have a distinct advantage. For hackers to win, they only need to breach a system once, while defenders must deflect each and every attack to be successful.

“Cyber warfare is an important asymmetric dimension of conflict that North Korea will probably continue to emphasize— in part because of its deniability and low relative costs,” Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the commander of United States Forces Korea, testified.

An Hewlett-Packard Security Briefing from earlier this year said, “North Korea’s hermit infrastructure creates a cyber-terrain that deters reconnaissance. Because North Korea has few Internet connections to the outside world, anyone seeking intelligence on North Korea’s networks has to expend more resources for cyber reconnaissance.”

[Washington Post]