📱 2022-04-28 05:48:00 – Paris/France.
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SEOUL, April 28 (Reuters) - Although North Korea is stepping up its efforts to block citizens from seeing information from outside the country, a few tech-savvy individuals are managing to circumvent strict government controls on smartphones, a US-based group said in a report.
"The scale of piracy still seems minor, but recent changes to North Korean legislation indicate that domestic authorities consider it a serious problem," said Lumen, a US-based nonprofit organization, founded to provide North Koreans with access to uncensored information. media, said in a report released this week.
Most of the knowledge needed to hack phones came from North Koreans who had been sent to China to work, often at software outsourcing companies, the report said.
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Smartphones have proliferated in North Korea, but very few people are allowed to access the global internet. In-country devices must have government apps and other controls that monitor usage and restrict access.
Working with ERNW, an independent Germany-based IT security service, the report's authors screened North Korean smartphones and tablets for government controls and interviewed two defectors who said they were able to circumvent those restrictions before fleeing the country. .
The research overturns assumptions that, cut off from the internet, North Koreans lacked the knowledge and tools to mount an effective attack on state information control mechanisms, the report concludes.
The purpose of the hack was to bypass the security of the phone and to be able to install different apps, photo filters and media files which otherwise would not be allowed.
The report says a phone's resale value could also be increased by accessing and deleting screenshots taken automatically with the "Trace Viewer", an app in every phone. smartphone North Korean that takes random screenshots and locks them away from the user, to try to deter illicit activities.
The Lumen report says it's possible that state engineers responded to the techniques described by the hackers by disabling the USB interface used to access the phone.
North Korea also disabled Wi-Fi access on devices and only recently reintroduced it once controls such as SIM cards, passwords and supported devices were designed to ensure Wi-Fi can only be used for approved purposes, according to the report.
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Reporting by Josh Smith; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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