North Korea and their Internet Usage

A short article by Marco Pisco. Published on May 7, 2023. Last updated on May 7, 2023.

TL;DR: North Korea has 4 IP Blocks, and some of them are active on the BitTorrent network. They have internet through a (most-likely) Chinese State-Owned telecom, and a Russian (most-likely) State-Owned Telecom. They also use the Internet to spread propaganda on Social Media, like Instagram.

The dictatorship of North Korea. It’s very interesting in my opinion.

Although it’s most likely going to be the reason for World War 3, it’s very interesting to dive into their history and things they are currently doing.

What I really find interesting is that North Korea has 3 Public Internet Address blocks that have been reserved (and are currently used) under the name Ryugyong-dong.

And interestingly, it appears some of the IP addresses in their blocks have been on BitTorrent DHT lately (as of writing this article).

Previously, I’ve gone through the list of 28 (or so) websites and advised the North Korean tech admins to enable SSL on them (and to fix the certificates on most of them).

Obvious to say that I never actually got a response in the first place, and that they most likely never even opened the email and just deleted it scared that it could have malware (because it came from an external source).

But how they have Internet in the country (especially because of the sanctions implied on North Korea) is actually interesting. It appears that they have publicly listed peers with both Chinese and Russian companies.

The first company (Cenbong) appears to be a ghost company (most likely state owned). With little to no information on Google, a dead website, and weird IP block information, it looks to just be a Chinese State owned company that serves with purpose to provide North Korea with internet.

The second company appears to be Russian State owned according to some research. They own a ton of IP addresses and appear to Downstream a ton of companies (like Sprint, the US carrier), and that includes North Korea. 

North Korea appears to use their Internet connection to spread propaganda on Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. Instagram reports that one of the accounts that are used for Propaganda is based on China. Instagram (and the entirety of Facebook as a whole) is blocked in China in result of censorship on the firewall, so it appears that North Korea has a bypass on Chinese internet through the censorship firewall. 

And it appears that they’ve somehow imported phones into the country, as statcounter.com appears to have gotten actual stats from North Korea visiting external websites showing that the state perfers Apple devices. 

North Korea appears to be slowly adopting into the new age of the Internet. Although most citizens can only access Kwangmyong (internally) as “Internet”, it seems that some higher class citizens or students have access to the Internet now.