Serious question, if the United States decided to unilaterally cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables?
North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
Even if it were only temporary, suddenly cutting off the Internet to the country would expose all of those remote workers to the people who employ them and don’t realize they are employing North Koreans when they all disappear at once.
Is this just not logistically feasible? or are we just too afraid it would be unpalatable to our allies? I can’t be the first person who has thought of this.
Out of interest I looked up who controls the DNS root servers:
Europe (2): RIPE and Netnod AB. RIPE is Europe’s RIR, run as a conference by European ISPs. Netnod is a Swedish ISP.
Asia (1): Project WIDE, part of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
US (9): Verisign, Cogent, NASA, US Department of Defense, US Army, the University of Maryland, ISC (as in the Bind9 people), ICANN itself, and the University of Southern California.
The last two seem to have some overlap and there is probably a lot of overlap between all of these organisations.
Verisign runs two root servers which is why the list has twelve entries but the root servers run from A to M.
The US owns the world, the same way any big empire does. Exersice of soft power when it works, and violently explosive power when it doesn't. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, not from who owns some DNS servers.
Most of North Korea’s traffic is routed through China so it’d require cutting the latter off from the internet. With the amount of submarine cables connecting China to other countries, it wouldn’t be very feasible.
You think they are doing this from NK ip blocks/asn? Their physical links are more or less enemy of enemy with US, so they have no incentive to block. Its impossible to keep them off the internet.
It’s a dumb question simply because we know most North Korean cyber agents are working abroad- they literally live in China or somewhere else and setup infrastructure elsewhere to remote into.
Funny thing about American meddling is that it always comes back to bite the US in the ass. The War of Terror has cost $8 trillion and there's nothing tangible and lasting the US has to show for it. Groups like Al Qaeda, ISIS (esp. their networks across Libya, Iraq, etc.) are offshoots of American meddling in the region, growing healthily despite everything.
Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iran (now a rabid enemy), Iraq, Syria, and Libya, are all failures of that World Police ethos that the US refuses to disengage from.
>Serious question, if the United States decided to unilaterally cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables?
You will have to cut cables going to Russia (and\or out of Russia) and China at least.
> cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables?
> Is this just not logistically feasible?
NK shares a physical border with China and Russia. Not to mention that we can send data by means other than a physical wire.
Even if you were willing to block Russia and China from "the internet" (lol) it would be nearly logistically impossible.
Even if you were willing to destroy all sense of privacy and track every single packet sent (what a terrible dystopian idea), there's still going to be ways to fake this. It would only make it harder, not impossible.
N.Korea is a Chinese weapon, unfortunately. To do something like cut off their internet would be considered an attack on China. China is their border where do you think they get connected to the internet.
First consider that the internet was designed to withstand and endure attacks upon it. So long as at least one connection remains, the nodes thereof remain accessible.
Next, consider that the authority of US sovereignty ends at US borders. The US legally cannot unilaterally do anything to anything outside of its own borders.
Next, consider that both North Korea and more importantly China have no damns to give about what the US wants.
Next, consider the first point again. Any actions made domestically can and likely will be circumvented by people who do not agree with them. An obvious example is people running their own DNS servers configured in defiance of US government orders.
> First consider that the internet was designed to withstand and endure attacks upon it. So long as at least one connection remains, the nodes thereof remain accessible.
Tell me you haven't worked in network infrastructure without telling me you haven't worked in network infrastructure.
> Next, consider that the authority of US sovereignty ends at US borders. The US legally cannot unilaterally do anything to anything outside of its own borders.
I mean, sure, officially, when all laws are followed and in a friction-less plane this is correct. However the United States does all kinds of shit unilaterally outside it's own borders, literally all the time, not the least of which every war we've been in post WWII, and incalculable numbers of other tom-fuckery carried out on all levels of secrecy and non-secrecy by all manner of organizations identified by three letters, most commonly the CIA.
> They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
I never thought about it like this but it’s the largest open air prison on earth.
This wouldn't work against the bad actors as they could just proxy through a friendly (to NK) country. And would set a bad precedent of using Internet access as a tool for sanctioning.
The Chinese government had built the infrastructure for the Great Firewall, allowing them to block whoever they want. The US does not have this capability.
>North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
Do you think that the only place north korean hackers operate from is inside north Korea?
They already partially operate from China. They would just do that more. They could even have their own connection to China and connect to the Internet from there. It's going to be a wack-a-mole thing that they easily win.
Sure. As if they couldn't reroute through any other country. They're already cut off by their leadership, except for the state sponsored cybercriminal groups which don't need a NK IP.
Taking you seriously: I’m pretty sure NK has non-oceanic interconnects with both China and Russia. So unless your plan involves attacking within the internationally recognized borders of either and living with the consequences, the answer is “not easy.”
I assume the US is willing to do this because we do it frequently, though not with China or Russia. I’m not sure about the DPRK, and was asking more of a technical question than a political one. Like, how many cables would we need to cut and how exposed are they? I’m aware they’re a nuclear power (ish) and the politics aren’t trivial.
If you mean SpaceX’s Starlink they obviously can’t. Elon clearly controls who uses it where.
If you are just using the term generically and mean other satellite connections, maybe, but limiting them to satellite internet only where we couldn’t take out a dish would certainly be crippling to the crimes I’m referencing!
This is impressive analysis, but have I overlooked the laundering part? Money laundering is providing an explanation about why it is clean, not hiding the reason that it might be dirty.
and when the crypto passes through a government’s address it magically becomes clean :))
so the whole blacklist concept is dumb because the same funds have to be reset, but the old chains of transactions are still being passed around as if its a “gotcha” but theyre really irrelevant quickly and reintegrated back into the economy quickly
> DoJ investigation found.. [banking] business had been used to launder more than $650m between 2016 and 2021 from US fentanyl sales for Chinese crime groups and drug traffickers.
> An estimated $5.3 billion of laundered money into B.C. real estate in 2018 hiked housing prices 5 per cent, two special reports released Thursday by the provincial government show.
The FATF report goes into it in more detail [0], but to put it very simply - Australia doesn't have the protections it should, when it comes to money laundering.
No. The linked article admits they're wildly guessing and links to another report with recommendations but no numbers I saw from a skim. I hear this repeated regularly on HN but am yet to see a reliable source beyond "but it's Chinese money".
> DoJ investigation found.. [banking] business had been used to launder more than $650m between 2016 and 2021 from US fentanyl sales for Chinese crime groups and drug traffickers.
According to the official CIA "world factbook" or whatever that is called: an estimated 3% to 5% of the world's fucking entire GDP is linked to criminal activities.
Blockchains are cool in that they allow to follow the laundering (so it allows for nice blog entries with good looking graphs, which I do appreciate), as opposed to traditional banks where it's all opaque.
But the amount of money laundered using cryptocurrencies is a drop in the bucket compared to size of criminal activities ongoing in the world (btw criminal activities predates blockchain by centuries or millenia).
And don't get me started on the missing billions when "aid" is sent to this and that country. Be it Ukraine or Haiti or whatever: there are corrupt officials and individuals at every single step of the ladder.
My favorite is the US loading a 747 with 12 billions in bills of $100 USD to "help the reconstruction of Iraq" and officially 9 billions of those 12 billions have been "lost".
Yup. Lost. That's official stuff.
So the $200m of the Lazarus group, compared to $9 billion in $100 USD bills: cry me a river.
Do you have a source for 'My favorite is the US loading a 747 with 12 billions in bills of $100 USD to "help the reconstruction of Iraq" and officially 9 billions of those 12 billions have been "lost".'
Your numbers seem a bit off, but it is definitely an outrageous incident.
"This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things."
I always assumed that bitcoin was propped up by purchases from money laundering - so that the total value of bitcoins more or less equalled the 3-5% of global GDP that is illegal / laundered etc.
Once upon a time when I looked at it the numbers seemed to stack up - everyone and their dog just used crypto as one stage in the laundering cycle is the assumption
> So the $200m of the Lazarus group, compared to $9 billion in $100 USD bills: cry me a river.
I don't think the US cares about a $200m, whatever that $200m belong to. Their issue is that this money is enabling a regime they want to see inert (since the nuclear shield means that the DPRK is not going anywhere anytime soon).
The problem with "money laundering" is that its theory and its operation are the inverse of one another.
The theory is supposed to be that you make it illegal to conceal the source of money that is the proceeds of a crime, so you can prosecute criminals for money laundering even if you couldn't prove the original crime. Which, to begin with, is pretty sus. Basically an attempt to end run around the government satisfying its burden of proof for the underlying crime.
But that also doesn't work. The criminals just set up a legitimate business as a front, claim the money came from there and the only way to prove otherwise is to uncover the original crime. So in practice money laundering is overwhelmingly charged in one of two cases.
One, they already proved the original crime and tack on a money laundering charge which is pointlessly redundant because those criminals were already caught. Two, you get some innocent people who -- unlike career criminals -- don't understand how money laundering laws work, so even though they were doing nothing wrong, they do something which is technically money laundering (because the rules criminalize innocuous and common behavior), or trigger the false positive AI nonsense, and then get charged with money laundering or booted out of the banking system.
Meanwhile large criminal organizations know how to make their transactions look like innocent transactions and then the government yells at banks for not catching them, even though the banks have no real way to do that because the criminal organizations made their transactions look like innocent transactions.
This is a dumb law that does more harm than good. Just get rid of it and charge the criminals with their actual crimes.
Don't worry, Australia's going to fix that! By making "harming public confidence in the banking system or financial markets" "serious harm" under the upcoming Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024.
And by "fix", I mean "suppress discussion about", of course.
We could drop western Europe into central BC / Alberta/ Sask. / Manitoba and not notice.
Or, we could destroy our small builders, import millions of immigrants incapable of construction / trade work, inflate asset prices, pay for their housing with government grants, lie about CPI inflation, and fix it all if we just…
“only allow Canadian nationals to own real estate”?
BOOK TO READ: Wilful Blindness: How a network of narcos, tycoons and CCP agents infiltrated the West by Sam Cooper - an investigative Canadian journalist, to get a deep dive into how long this has been going on.
This current government in power [9 years now; the Trudeau Liberal-NDP majority voting power coalition] has done nothing but to allow rampant fraud including this to continue; Trudeau himself on video has stated he admires China's basic dictatorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8FuHuUhNZ0
So all the crypto went to paxful/noones, and was converted to fiat there. Should be pretty straightforward to subpoena them and get all data about their fiat accounts?
Question from my curious mind. How are the Metamask instances of specific device getting replaced by modified/malware-d version? How does that even work?
Thanks! That is some extensive level of social engineering, reconnaissance and exploiting. Takes a lot of patience and discipline to pull such sophisticated heist.
Readit News
North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
Even if it were only temporary, suddenly cutting off the Internet to the country would expose all of those remote workers to the people who employ them and don’t realize they are employing North Koreans when they all disappear at once.
Is this just not logistically feasible? or are we just too afraid it would be unpalatable to our allies? I can’t be the first person who has thought of this.
Europe (2): RIPE and Netnod AB. RIPE is Europe’s RIR, run as a conference by European ISPs. Netnod is a Swedish ISP.
Asia (1): Project WIDE, part of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
US (9): Verisign, Cogent, NASA, US Department of Defense, US Army, the University of Maryland, ISC (as in the Bind9 people), ICANN itself, and the University of Southern California.
The last two seem to have some overlap and there is probably a lot of overlap between all of these organisations.
Verisign runs two root servers which is why the list has twelve entries but the root servers run from A to M.
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All the “international sovereignty” responses are humorous to anyone whose paid attention to the last twenty years of the American military.
Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iran (now a rabid enemy), Iraq, Syria, and Libya, are all failures of that World Police ethos that the US refuses to disengage from.
You will have to cut cables going to Russia (and\or out of Russia) and China at least.
Not to mention wireless comms.
Even if you were willing to block Russia and China from "the internet" (lol) it would be nearly logistically impossible.
Even if you were willing to destroy all sense of privacy and track every single packet sent (what a terrible dystopian idea), there's still going to be ways to fake this. It would only make it harder, not impossible.
Next, consider that the authority of US sovereignty ends at US borders. The US legally cannot unilaterally do anything to anything outside of its own borders.
Next, consider that both North Korea and more importantly China have no damns to give about what the US wants.
Next, consider the first point again. Any actions made domestically can and likely will be circumvented by people who do not agree with them. An obvious example is people running their own DNS servers configured in defiance of US government orders.
So to answer your question:
Is it legally feasible? No.
Is it politically feasible? No.
Is it logistically feasible? No.
Is it physically feasible? No.
Is it good that this isn't feasible? Yes.
Tell me you haven't worked in network infrastructure without telling me you haven't worked in network infrastructure.
> Next, consider that the authority of US sovereignty ends at US borders. The US legally cannot unilaterally do anything to anything outside of its own borders.
I mean, sure, officially, when all laws are followed and in a friction-less plane this is correct. However the United States does all kinds of shit unilaterally outside it's own borders, literally all the time, not the least of which every war we've been in post WWII, and incalculable numbers of other tom-fuckery carried out on all levels of secrecy and non-secrecy by all manner of organizations identified by three letters, most commonly the CIA.
I never thought about it like this but it’s the largest open air prison on earth.
https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-hacker-internet-outa...
https://archive.is/rWpjI
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_room
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Do you think that the only place north korean hackers operate from is inside north Korea?
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If you are just using the term generically and mean other satellite connections, maybe, but limiting them to satellite internet only where we couldn’t take out a dish would certainly be crippling to the crimes I’m referencing!
so the whole blacklist concept is dumb because the same funds have to be reset, but the old chains of transactions are still being passed around as if its a “gotcha” but theyre really irrelevant quickly and reintegrated back into the economy quickly
> DoJ investigation found.. [banking] business had been used to launder more than $650m between 2016 and 2021 from US fentanyl sales for Chinese crime groups and drug traffickers.
Canada 2018, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33918115
> An estimated $5.3 billion of laundered money into B.C. real estate in 2018 hiked housing prices 5 per cent, two special reports released Thursday by the provincial government show.
Australia 2015, https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/06/stop-money-launderi...
> Credit Suisse estimates some $28 billion of Chinese money has been invested in the Australian housing market over the past six years
[0] https://www.fatf-gafi.org/content/dam/fatf-gafi/mer/Mutual-E...
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According to the official CIA "world factbook" or whatever that is called: an estimated 3% to 5% of the world's fucking entire GDP is linked to criminal activities.
Blockchains are cool in that they allow to follow the laundering (so it allows for nice blog entries with good looking graphs, which I do appreciate), as opposed to traditional banks where it's all opaque.
But the amount of money laundered using cryptocurrencies is a drop in the bucket compared to size of criminal activities ongoing in the world (btw criminal activities predates blockchain by centuries or millenia).
And don't get me started on the missing billions when "aid" is sent to this and that country. Be it Ukraine or Haiti or whatever: there are corrupt officials and individuals at every single step of the ladder.
My favorite is the US loading a 747 with 12 billions in bills of $100 USD to "help the reconstruction of Iraq" and officially 9 billions of those 12 billions have been "lost".
Yup. Lost. That's official stuff.
So the $200m of the Lazarus group, compared to $9 billion in $100 USD bills: cry me a river.
Your numbers seem a bit off, but it is definitely an outrageous incident.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-jun-13-la-fg-mi...
"This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things."
Once upon a time when I looked at it the numbers seemed to stack up - everyone and their dog just used crypto as one stage in the laundering cycle is the assumption
I don't think the US cares about a $200m, whatever that $200m belong to. Their issue is that this money is enabling a regime they want to see inert (since the nuclear shield means that the DPRK is not going anywhere anytime soon).
The theory is supposed to be that you make it illegal to conceal the source of money that is the proceeds of a crime, so you can prosecute criminals for money laundering even if you couldn't prove the original crime. Which, to begin with, is pretty sus. Basically an attempt to end run around the government satisfying its burden of proof for the underlying crime.
But that also doesn't work. The criminals just set up a legitimate business as a front, claim the money came from there and the only way to prove otherwise is to uncover the original crime. So in practice money laundering is overwhelmingly charged in one of two cases.
One, they already proved the original crime and tack on a money laundering charge which is pointlessly redundant because those criminals were already caught. Two, you get some innocent people who -- unlike career criminals -- don't understand how money laundering laws work, so even though they were doing nothing wrong, they do something which is technically money laundering (because the rules criminalize innocuous and common behavior), or trigger the false positive AI nonsense, and then get charged with money laundering or booted out of the banking system.
Meanwhile large criminal organizations know how to make their transactions look like innocent transactions and then the government yells at banks for not catching them, even though the banks have no real way to do that because the criminal organizations made their transactions look like innocent transactions.
This is a dumb law that does more harm than good. Just get rid of it and charge the criminals with their actual crimes.
Don't worry, Australia's going to fix that! By making "harming public confidence in the banking system or financial markets" "serious harm" under the upcoming Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024.
And by "fix", I mean "suppress discussion about", of course.
We could drop western Europe into central BC / Alberta/ Sask. / Manitoba and not notice.
Or, we could destroy our small builders, import millions of immigrants incapable of construction / trade work, inflate asset prices, pay for their housing with government grants, lie about CPI inflation, and fix it all if we just…
“only allow Canadian nationals to own real estate”?
This current government in power [9 years now; the Trudeau Liberal-NDP majority voting power coalition] has done nothing but to allow rampant fraud including this to continue; Trudeau himself on video has stated he admires China's basic dictatorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8FuHuUhNZ0
ABC - Anti Bribery & Corruption
AML - Anti Money Laundering
CTF - Counter Terrorism Financing
FATF - Financial Action Task Force
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This article does a good job explaining it more in depth.[0]
0: https://securelist.com/the-bluenoroff-cryptocurrency-hunt-is...