North Korea Reportedly Still Procures U.S. Tech Products, Allegedly for Cyberattacks

Despite sanctions leveled at North Korea, several tech products from the U.S. are still making their way to the isolated country, according to recent reports. What’s more, it seems these products are being used to carry out cyber attacks, which have caused considerable damages around the world. Apparently, this is due to certain loopholes in the details of the sanctions.

The details come via a report from Recorded Future, a threat analysis firm that discovered how North Korea’s cyber arsenal is mostly made up of U.S. computers and hardware. As a result, the isolated nation was able to carry out several cyber attacks that target dozens of countries and institutions all over the world.

The most prominent among these was the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017, which essentially crippled facilities in over 150 countries. It even held hospitals and airports hostage, and all of it was largely because the isolated nation’s dedicated team of hackers is equipped with American technology.

“This failure to keep American technology from reaching North Korea has enabled North Korea’s destabilizing, disruptive, and destructive cyber operations as well as its internet-enabled circumvention of international sanctions,” the report reads.

As to how North Korea is even getting the hardware and software it needed to carry out these attacks, it would seem that much of it is through middle-men who sell the products to the country or via North Koreans residing abroad. In the latter case, they would buy items like iPhones and MacBook units, and then ship them to their home country.

This isn’t entirely surprising since there has been evidence of the presence of these items in North Korea before. Photos of the country’s leaders holding iPhones have been circulating for a long time, The Washington Post reports, and computers with Microsoft’s Windows OS have been seen. It isn’t as if the U.S. can surround the country with an actual net either, so this was pretty much inevitable.