Northeast Asia Matters

South Korean Government Arrests Two Individuals Suspected of Espionage

2012-06-06T15:10:00.000-04:00

This is a bit dated, but according to Arirang News, reported on May 31st, the South Korean Government (ROKG) has arrested two people for suspicion of espionage in early May and a third in police custody for the suspicion of assisting in the said espionage efforts.

Apparently the two suspected of committing espionage against the ROK were working for North Korea to collect information on GPS-related technology, electronic jamming devices, and an air defense radar system. While this is a complete speculation, after reading this bit of news, one cannot help but wonder if there is any relationship between the GPS jamming incidents that occurred earlier this year (April 28 - May 14) and the information that were alleged to have been sought by the two individuals who were arrested in early May. I would think that it would certainly make sense that these two incidents are related....

The Latest Chapter of the North Korean Cyber Campaign against South Korea

2012-06-06T13:33:00.001-04:00

The South Korean government (ROKG) believes it has sniffed out a genuine North Korean cyber campaign efforts against South Korea. The Arirang News has reported on June 4th that the South Korean police has arrested a man identified as Cho on Sunday, June 3rd, for distributing mal-ware embedded computer games in South Korea. The mal-ware is believed to be developed by the North Korean Reconnaissance Bureau, which oversees the North Korean cyber units such as Unit 121 (discussions of other cyber related units can be found here). The Arirang News reports that Cho is suspected of purchasing the programs in Shenyang, China, which has been known for housing the North Korean hacker activities outside of North Korea. It would be interesting to see what comes about with the most recent arrest although the ROKG is usually very sensitive when it comes to this type of events, and I suspect that it will be no different this time around, and probably will not put out too much information for the purview of the public.

On a side note, I discovered that there are quite a few cyber-related sites on the Internet that actually cites me as their primary source of information about the North Korean cyber capabilities (some of the hyper-links in this posting will take you to some of these sites). While it was very nice to see that people are actually citing my work, I would like to take this opportunity to make one thing clear to everyone... it is not too important, but I thought I'd set the record straight for good. Almost all of the sites say that they got the information from an "internal report" or an "internal document"; however, the work they are citing is NOT an "internal report" or an "internal document". What they have the link to is the English translation version of the journal article that was published in the June 2009 issue of Defense and Technology, which is in Korean.

North Korea: Witness to Transformation | The Death of Kim Jong Il: Diplomatic Reactions

2012-01-03T11:08:00.000-05:00

A great piece from Prof. Stephen Haggard on possible diplomatic approaches to North Korea in the wake of Kim Jong-il's death: The Death of Kim Jong Il: Diplomatic Reactions.

Enjoy!