Russia Providing North Korea With Internet Access, Assists Cyberattacks

A Russian telecommunications company began providing an internet connection to North Korea over the weekend according to 38 North, a North Korea monitoring project run by Johns Hopkins University.

The new connection provided to the isolated nation comes from TransTeleCom and serves as just the second link the the internet available in North Korea. Prior to the Russian service, North Korea relied solely on a connection provided by China.

38 North reported the connection first appeared online at around 5:38 p.m. local time in North Korea. The link may have doubled the nation’s bandwidth, providing North Korea with higher resilience against cyber attacks directed at the country and additional resources for attacks launched from within the nation’s borders.

TransTeleCom issued a brief statement following 38 North’s report on the apparent internet access being provided by the Russian company to North Korea, though did not directly address the possibility that it is helping North Korea stay connected.

“TransTeleCom (TTK) has historically had a connection to the communication network of North Korea under the agreement with Korea Posts and Telecommunications Corp, which was signed in 2009,” the company said.

The telecommunications firm is a subsidiary company of Russian Railways, a state-owned organization that maintains a monopoly over the Russian rail system. Russian Railways president Oleg Belozyorov was named to the head of the company after members in the inner circle of Russian President Vladimir Putin lobbied for him.

TransTeleCom has become one of the largest telecommunications providers in Russia by laying fiber optic cables alongside the massive stretches of railway owned by the parent company. According to a map on the company’s website, one of its routes runs directly up to the North Korean border.

The timing of the new connection is particularly curious. Over the weekend, it was reported that the United States Cyber Command was carrying out denial of service attacks against state-sponsored hackers in North Korea. The attacks were designed to overwhelm the systems utilized by the hackers with traffic in order to make those systems impossible to use.

The Russian internet connection provided to North Korea began less than 24 hours after the attacks carried about by U.S. Cyber Command were scheduled to end and is likely to provide the nation with additional protection in case of future denial of service attacks.

Relying on a single internet provider has left North Korea vulnerable to attack in the past. The hacking collective Anonymous has claimed responsibility for knocking the country offline through a denial of service attack—though there is little evidence to back the group’s claim.

While Russia’s primary link to the internet has come from Chinese telecom Unicom since 2010, Russia is not the first nation to provide the reclusive nation with an alternate route for internet connectivity. In 2012, North Korea also received a second link from Intelsat, an international satellite telecommunications provider.