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Post by Admin on Sept 20, 2018 18:14:19 GMT
North Korea is prepared to "permanently" close down one of its main ballistic missile facilities in the presence of foreign experts, an offer it said would need to be met with American reciprocity.
Speaking in front of about 150,000 North Koreans in the May Day Stadium in the capital Pyongyang on Wednesday, the leaders of the two Koreas said their meetings over two days had ushered in a new era of peace.
They had agreed to turn the Korean Peninsula into a "land of peace without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats", said South Korea's President Moon Jae-in.
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Post by Admin on Oct 12, 2018 18:07:08 GMT
After just seven years under the rule of Kim Jong Un, North Korea is in a moment of change. Most visibly to the outside world, Kim — the third generation of North Korea's founding family to lead the nation — has made 2018 a year of unprecedented diplomatic engagement, with South Korea and the U.S. Signs of change are visible inside the country, too. Once thought of as a Stalinist relic preserved in amber, with empty streets, cold gray buildings and an outdated airport, Pyongyang of today looks increasingly modern, as do a handful of other cities targeted for development. Conditions are worse in less favored areas — there are still shortages of food and electricity — but the country's economy is improving despite sanctions, and, overall, quality of life has come a long way since the famine of the 1990s. It is hard to know what this flurry of modernization and diplomacy means for North Korea in the long term. Sanctions remain in place. The vast majority of North Koreans still can't travel freely, access the global Internet or express any sentiment about the leadership other than praise and gratitude. There's no guarantee that the authoritarian, dynastic regime can survive dramatic changes to the country's economy and a growing awareness among North Koreans of the quality of life outside their borders.
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Post by Admin on Oct 15, 2018 18:05:41 GMT
During our six-day stay there, timed to the 70th anniversary of the country's founding by Kim Il Sung, we were brought to witness a classic set of North Korean spectacles. Chief among them were the massive parades — one during the day to showcase the county's military power; the other, at night by torchlight, a display of a population in actual lockstep. We were taken on highly orchestrated tours of factories, a school and a farm. The country and its message are still tightly controlled by the grandson of North Korea's founder. We sought to both document these events and look beyond them for a glimpse at normal life for North Koreans. In those moments, and in between them, we saw a changing North Korea that was at turns impressive, surreal, beautiful, melancholy and human.
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2018 17:52:40 GMT
North Korea is reportedly preparing its Punggye-ri nuclear test site for international inspectors. The development was reported by South Korea's Yonhap news agency, citing the country's spy agency. In May, Sky's Tom Cheshire was the only British broadcaster invited to witness the apparent demolition of the facility, although no inspectors were present. He watched a series of explosions with North Korea state media claiming the site had been completely dismantled in the blasts "to ensure the transparency of discontinuance of nuclear test".
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Post by Admin on Nov 8, 2018 17:50:43 GMT
Hackers with links to the North Korean government used sophisticated Trojan malware dubbed “Trojan.Fastcash” to steal tens of millions of dollars from ATMs across Asia and Africa, according to a report from the cybersecurity firm Symantec. The hacking group, known as Lazarus, used the malware to infect the servers controlling the ATMs, allowing them to intercept their own fraudulent transaction requests and withdraw cash. Similar ATM attacks have been raising alarms since late 2016, according to a warning released last month by Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), the organization responsible for analyzing and reducing cyber threats. One event in 2017 saw cash simultaneously withdrawn from ATMs across 30 different countries, and another attack earlier this year saw cash withdrawn across 23 countries. Symantec notes that every FASTCash attack so far has hit servers running unsupported versions of its AIX operating system, suggesting that the vulnerabilities exploited by the hackers have since been patched. The hack leads Symantec to believe that that Lazarus, the North Korea-linked group that’s thought to be behind these latest attacks, is now more motivated by stealing money rather than furthering the state’s agenda. The group first gained international notoriety as a result of the Sony Pictures hack that resulted in the leak of the film The Interview, a comedy set in North Korea. However, since then, their crimes have been much more financial in nature, including the theft of $81 million in the Bangladesh Bank robbery and the WannaCry ransomware attacks.
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