Kim Jong-un: Slave labor for North Koreans who hack their state smartphones

North Koreans may face three weeks in a labor camp and fines if they hack their state-approved smartphones, according to defectors.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un announced the new laws after a new hack emerged that gives users root access to Pyongyang’s copycat “iPhone,” a process known as “rooting” or “jailbreaking.”  

By default, the phones are restricted to regime-approved websites and come with a surveillance app called Trace Viewer that randomly takes screenshots and stores them in a folder where they cannot be deleted.

Root access gives users privileges to modify every aspect of the phone and software, which means they can remove the state surveillance app, delete the screenshots and access the global internet if desired.

In a report published by human rights organization Lumen and IT security firm ERNW, two defectors say rooting was made possible by an app smuggled in from China. One worked as a software engineer there, while another said he obtained it from his peers in the computer science program at Kim Il Sung University.

“The scale of the hacking still appears to be minor, but recent changes to North Korean law indicate national authorities view it as a serious problem,” says the report.

People who illegally install a “mobile phone manipulation programme” face “at least three months of labour education.”

Those who are discovered with an “impure publication” or a “propaganda material blocking programme” could be fined up to 100,000 North Korean won – only about $125, but ten times an average North Korean’s annual salary.

The report notes that hacking wasn’t always motivated by a desire to undermine state censorship. Rooting was also use to “clear the memory of files so the phones could reach a higher price on the secondary market” because a Trace Viewer folder full of screenshots is a tell-tale sign of an older handset.

The regime has responded by disabling the USB file transfer functions of state smartphones, as jailbreaking required they be connected to a PC. They also temporarily disabled Wi-Fi on the phones until controls were implemented to ensure it could only be used to access regime-approved websites.