Search Results for: hacking

March 8, 2017

China is waging economic war against S. Korea. We must stand by our ally.

Less than two years ago, I wrote of the coming Korea missile crisis. That crisis has now arrived. As I’ve documented at this site, that crisis is, in large part, a crisis of China’s making. North Korean missiles are made in part from Chinese technology, in large part from components purchased in or smuggled through China, and that are almost always procured by North Korean agents who operate more-or-less openly on Chinese soil. North Korea’s missiles ride on Chinese trucks....

Categories An Alliance?/China/China & Korea/Japan & Korea
March 6, 2017

U.N. report: SWIFT banking network violated North Korea asset freeze

Since last year, this blog has covered SWIFT’s continued provision of financial messaging services to North Korean banks, despite suspicions that North Korea was involved in stealing almost $100 million from the Bangladesh Bank by hacking into SWIFT’s messaging software. Later, I wrote about an effort in the last Congress to ban North Korean banks from SWIFT, mirroring a sanction that was one of our most effective measures against Iran. SWIFT is effectively the postal service of the financial system,...

Categories "United" Nations/Europe/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions
February 6, 2017

The Commerce Department should review PUST’s export licenses for North Korea

Last week, several news outlets reported that representatives of PUST, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, are in the United States, seeking support to expand their curriculum in North Korea. PUST didn’t say what kind of support it seeks, but recent reports suggest that PUST has lost donors and had to slash its budget. PUST is probably looking for money. Donors, however, would be wise to keep their checkbooks closed until the Commerce Department and a U.N. Panel of...

Categories Cyberwar/Engagement/Technology
December 13, 2016

Trump is right: China isn’t helping us disarm N. Korea

The Chinese government and the anti-anti-Beijing commentariat in the U.S. are apoplectic over Donald Trump again — this time, because Trump questioned the sacrosanct one-China policy and China’s cooperation in disarming North Korea: Trump’s latest foray into East Asian affairs came when he was asked by “Fox News Sunday†about the planning for the Dec. 2 call. He said he learned about the call “an hour or two†before it took place but said he understood the stakes. “I fully...

Categories China/U.S. Politics
November 28, 2016

There’s no appeasing North Korea

North Korea has violated or summarily withdrawn from an armistice, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, two IAEA safeguards agreements, an inter-Korean denuclearization agreement, two agreed frameworks, a joint denuclearization statement, the Leap Day agreement, and six U.N. Security Council resolutions — and yet, the most stubborn “engagers” of Pyongyang look on this clear historical record and declare that it calls for yet another piece of paper. Now that calls to negotiate a peace treaty with Pyongyang are metastasizing from the pro-North...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
November 17, 2016

As Trump picks his cabinet, Congress flexes its foreign policy muscle

As we continue to watch Trump’s trial balloons float by on the selection of his national security cabinet, we still don’t know much about the foreign policy Donald Trump would have as President. On the other hand, most of Congress’s key players on foreign policy will still be around next year, and some of them have already begun to assert themselves. Committee chairs are (on one hand) pushing Trump to adopt more conventional foreign policy views, while (on the other) threatening...

Categories U.S. Law/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
October 11, 2016

FP: White House “heatedly debating” whether to enforce North Korea sanctions law

Last week, Samantha Power was in Seoul, reassuring our increasingly panicky South Korean allies that the U.S. will use “all the tools in our tool kit” to deny His Porcine Majesty hard currency and WMD materiel, and pressure him to disarm. Meanwhile, a must-read article in Foreign Policy reveals that late in the eleventh hour of his presidency, Barack Obama still hasn’t decided to use “all” the tools after all, particularly the one Congress wants him to use — secondary sanctions...

Categories Sanctions/Washington Views
October 3, 2016

H.R. 6281, banning N. Korea from SWIFT, would be a powerful sanctions upgrade

Via Yonhap, we learned last week that Rep. Matt Salmon (R, Ariz.), the Chairman of the House Asia-Pacific Subcommittee, has introduced a bill to cut North Korea off from the “specialized financial messaging services” that banks use to send wire transfer orders around the world. The industry leader for financial messaging is SWIFT, whose headquarters is in Brussels, but which also has operations in Geneva and Manassas, Virginia. If you don’t know what SWIFT does and why it matters, I’ll...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law
July 26, 2016

If Pyongyang won’t disarm, what’s the point of talks?

Two think-pieces published last week, one by Sahand Moaref in The Diplomat and one by Patrick Cronin in Beyond Parallel, have encouraged me to write down some thoughts in response the best questions about North Korea sanctions, which have to do with our ultimate objectives, and how we can use sanctions relief as a diplomatic inducement without throwing away our leverage (today’s post is the first installment of those thoughts). There are also legitimate questions about our objectives. Is it...

Categories Diplomacy
July 15, 2016

When Kim Jong-un nukes off — and he will — here’s how we should respond (updated)

The U.N. Security Council was already meeting about how to respond to North Korea’s latest missile tests when Pyongyang drew the curtain on its next act of satellite theater at Punggye-ri. Even without the latest sanctions, His Corpulency would probably have carried out another nuke test within the next year, if only to help consolidate his rule, and because the U.S. and South Korea are holding presidential elections. (North Korean dictators prefer to nuke off as new administrations assemble their...

Categories Sanctions
June 28, 2016

N. Korean counterfeiting surges as Bureau 39’s checks bounce.

When the Secret Service first found high-quality counterfeit dollars circulating in the Middle East over three decades ago, North Korea wasn’t the prime suspect; . The counterfeits were so good that experts could only tell them from the originals by the superior quality of their printing, so the Secret Service named them “supernotes.” The Secret Service’s suspicions shifted to North Korea in 2000, after Cambodian authorities arrested Yoshimi Tanaka, a Japanese Red Army hijacker who had taken refuge in North...

Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 13, 2016

Meet the “Libertarians” who would surrender our liberty & our security to Kim Jong-un’s censors

I doubt that America has fully come to terms with the damage done to its freedom of expression by the Sony cyberterrorist attack of 2014, or by the increasing willingness of Muslim supremacists to extinguish our civil liberties through violence. It is an easy thing to be a civil libertarian when the subject is, say, the limits of a proposed law allowing the FBI or NSA to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists’ communications or monitor their social media posts. Even if we...

Categories Censorship/Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
June 2, 2016

Congress asked for a real report on North Korean terrorism. The State Department hit CTRL-V and called it good.

As regular readers of this site have heard a few times by now, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, and despite overwhelming evidence, the Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” A few years ago, a less inquisitive Congress might actually have bought that, but in recent years, as North Korea’s sponsorship...

Categories Terrorism (NK)
May 31, 2016

How much have sanctions affected PUST? Not enough, apparently.

Chan-Mo Park, the Chancellor of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, or PUST, and a U.S. citizen, is blaming South Korean bilateral sanctions for his difficulties recruiting new academic talent. He told VOA on Wednesday, “We want to recruit South Korean professors, but the May 24 measure blocks it.” He was referring to trade and exchange sanctions South Korea made against North Korea on May 24, 2010. The sanctions came after South Korea accused the North of sinking one...

Categories Cyberwar
May 27, 2016

Global wave of bank burglaries should revive calls to kick N. Korea out of SWIFT

In recent weeks, I’ve watched with keen interest, and some schadenfreude, as news reports have implicated Pakistani and North Korean hackers in a series of massive bank burglaries involving as many as 12 banks around the world, starting with the theft of $81 million (or $101 million, depending on which report you believe) from the Bangladesh Bank’s account in the U.S. Federal Reserve. These burglaries did not involve guns or ski masks. They were something more like armored car burglaries,...

Categories Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions
December 8, 2015

Inter-Korean phone calls can keep the promises of the Sunshine Policy

Twenty years of state-to-state engagement between North and South Korea have not lived up to Kim Dae-Jung’s promises. Pyongyang has taken Seoul’s money, nuked up, and periodically attacked South Korea for good measure. Rather than reforming, it has invested heavily in sealing its borders. Pyongyang sustains itself on foreign hard currency, even as it cuts off the flow of people, goods, and information to its underprivileged classes. It knows that if it fails to do this, members of those classes...

Categories Appeasement/Border Control/Capitalism/Engagement/Refugees/Sunshine
December 7, 2015

Defectors: PUST is training North Korean hackers

Not for the first time, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a showpiece for academic engagement between North Korea and the Outer Earth, stands accused of teaching its elite students to work as hackers in Kim Jong-Un’s notorious cyberwarfare units.  North Korea is reportedly recruiting graduates from Pyongyang University of Science and Technology for cyber warfare. North Korean defector Jang Se-yul, who worked in the North’s electronic warfare command, and another defector Yi Chol claimed on Wednesday in a news conference...

Categories Cyberwar/Engagement
October 22, 2015

Congress wants answers on N. Korea and terrorism. The State Dep’t doesn’t have any.

As you may have heard somewhere, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” Since I collected and published that overwhelming evidence last year, I was looking forward to the day when the State Department would be called to Congress to confront it. Today was...

Categories Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics