WASHINGTON - North Korea’s senior leadership has been exploiting loopholes in international sanctions to obtain the U.S. technology that Pyongyang uses to conduct “destructive cyber operations,” according to a global cyberthreat intelligence company.
Recorded Future, based in Massachusetts, found that while export bans and restrictions are somewhat effective in keeping North Korea from acquiring technology for its nuclear weapons program, sanctions fail when it comes to regulating computer products from entering into North Korea.
“Because of the globalized nature of technology production and distribution, the traditional export control is not really working for [computer] technology,” said Priscilla Moriuchi, one of the authors of “It may work quite well for ballistic missile parts or , but the system is not designed to limit technology transfer, and it’s not optimized for that.”
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In the report, Moriuchi and her co-author, Fred Wolens, call for a “globally robust unified effort to impose comprehensive sanctions” on North Korea, warning that without this Pyongyang “will be able to continue its cyberwarfare operations unabated with the aid of Western technology.”
The report was released days before North Korean leader Kim Jung Un and U.S. President Donald Trump are scheduled to meet in Singapore for a summit focused on ending the North’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for economic incentives and security guarantees.
But as the threat of its nuclear weapons, , a former a senior adviser in the U.S. State Department Antiterrorism Assistance Program, wrote in The Hill.
Even as advance teams prepared for the June 12 summit, North Korean cyberattacks continued, . On May 28, it reported the about Hidden Cobra, which is associated with North Korea’s hacking activities.
FireEye, a Silicon Valley cybersecurity company, detected cyberattacks by Lazarus, the effort responsible for stealing millions of dollars from the Bangladesh Central Bank in 2016. Lazarus is also believed responsible for the and last year’s .
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How did U.S. technology reach North Korea? Part of the answer lies in “international inconsistencies in the definition of the term ‘luxury goods,’” according to the Recorded Future report. The U.S. “effort to restrict technology exports at the national and international level” has not reaped results because of “varied definitions by nations and [their] inconsistent implementations,” said Moriuchi, a former East Asia analyst for the National Security Agency.
While the United Nations did not include electronics in , which covered exports to North Korea, when it was issued in 2016, each member nation was allowed to interpret luxury goods. The to include laptop computers, digital music players, large flat-screen televisions and electronic entertainment software. China, in particular, does not “honor the luxury goods listed by other countries when it exports to” North Korea, according to the report.
Another factor is that for seven years in the period spanning 2002 to 2017, “the United States allowed the exportation of ‘computer and electronic products’ to North Korea,” according to the report. The total for those seven years was more than $430,000 of legal exports, and according to Recorded Future, “at its peak in 2014, the U.S. exported $215,862 worth of computers and electronic products to North Korea.”
The Recorded Future report, citing the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), said that category includes “computers, computer peripherals (including items like printers, monitors and storage devices), communications equipment (such as wired and wireless telephones), and similar components for these products.”
Much of that equipment remains in use, according to Recorded Future, and North Korea’s ruling elites, including party, military, and intelligence leaders and their families, have long been known to use products manufactured by U.S. companies such as .
A third element in how the U.S. tech went astray is North Korea’s “sophisticated sanctions evasion operation, which uses intermediaries and spoofs identities online.”
As an example, the study points to North Korea’s shell company Glocom with which Pyongyang “used a network of Asian-based front companies to buy computer components from electronic resellers, and the payment was even cleared through a U.S. bank account.” The was tied to , whose director, Ryang Su Nyo, reports to Liaison Office 519 in the North Korean intelligence agency’s Reconnaissance General Bureau.
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