Russia Just Gave North Korea a New Internet Connection

October 2, 2017

A new internet connectivity has been spotted in North Korea via Russian telecommunications company, TransTeleCom, amid rising tensions between the hermit kingdom and the United States.

The activity was spotted on Oct. 1 by Dyn Research, a company that specializes in monitoring internet connectivity, at around 9:00 a.m. GMT (5:00 a.m. ET), according to Reuters.

China Unicom was previously the telecommunications company reportedly responsible for carrying the internet traffic in and out of North Korea.

“The addition of Russian transit would create new internet path out of the country, increasing its resilience and international bandwidth capacity,” Doug Madory, who analyzes global internet connectivity over at Dyn Research said in a statement, according to 38North.

Bryce Boland, the FireEye’s chief technology officer for the Asia-Pacific region, believes that North Korea’s next internet connection is very much crucial to the hermit nation’s plans to conduct cyber attacks across the globe.

“This will improve the resiliency of their network and increase their ability to conduct command and control over those activities,” Boland said.

He continued to explain that most of the attacks that were conducted by North Korea came from outside of the country using a hijacked machine. The masterminds who were ordering and controlling the attacks reportedly remained inside North Korea while maintaining direct communication with the hackers.

Meanwhile, The Wash ington Post reported on Sept. 30 that the U.S. government is currently carrying out a denial of service (DoS) against hackers who are believed to be from North Korea. The cyber attacks, which is being carried out as part of the Cyber Command operation, was scheduled to end on Saturday.

Feature Image via Flickr / driver Photographer (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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