N.K.’s homegrown computer OSThis photo, provided by former Google employee Will Scott on July 23, 2019, shows the start screen of North Korea’s homegrown computer operating system Red Star’s 3.0 version. The U.S. business news website Business Insider reported on July 22 that Red Star’s start screen is similar to that of Apple’s Mac OS X. Scott obtained the Red Star OS while teaching computer science at a Pyongyang university between 2012-13. (Yonhap)
Similar to Apple OS? Closer to Linux with an add-on app launcher. I set up a Linux Ubuntu build once, just to learn how to do it. I think Red Star uses a Linux build as it’s base. Red Hat for Red Star? Maybe. We have nerdier ROK Heads that probably know more about it.
I recall a while back that Red Star was based on the linux kernel. Even if they branched off of a snapshot of linux to start their product they are still at a disadvantage. Linux has thousands of very smart people all over the world working on its many layers. While North Korea may have squads of highly skilled hackers, I doubt they could marshal the brigades of skilled people needed maintain and patch a sophisticated, evolving and secure system.
My bet is it is very hackable.
setnaffa
6 years ago
Linux is a fork off System V and OSX is a fork off BSD (like Solaris).
The nork distro is crippleware and essentially has a builtin remote syslog that sends your activities to Party apparatchiks. It was covered in some Linux forum several months back; but I didn’t even dare to d/l and run in a VM on an air-gapped throwaway PC. I’m still hoping to get a better job than Walmart Greeter.
kangaji
6 years ago
I’ve played with it on a VM that I just didn’t connect to the network with a hypervisor. It won’t give you root access and the etc/shadow directory is locked up. I want to run kali against it some time to try to crack the root password to get more info about what is going on. You can run a terminal session and the terminal session is basically redhat/fedora/centos type linux.
ChickenHead
6 years ago
No need to crack any passwords.
Just find a configuration file you can modify which executes in root and slip it your custom list of configurations… like configuring your user account to have root access.
Use this:
find / -perm -o+w | grep /udev/
If you find anything without “permission denied”, you are in.
FYI: Red Star is based on Red Hat which is based on Fedora. It also comes with the NSA’s SELinux installed.
setnaffa
6 years ago
Thank you both.
Smokes
6 years ago
Using *nix and Mac is like having sex with a muddy puddle.
You *could* but why bother? 😎
setnaffa
6 years ago
Smokes, you’ll need to ask Apple fanboys… all I know is based on last night’s presentation… I needed help from the music minister’s wife to change the desktop view to match the 40″ TV I was using as a second monitor. I don’t have that trouble with windows, ubuntu, mint, kali, or even parrot or sift. Of course, it might have been easier if they had adjusted the screen resolution down to 1920×1080 or I had brought my glasses…
Smokes
6 years ago
For personal use whatever floats your boat but for biz hands down MS. Getting annoyed with all the cheap-o products that come out for *nix because the developers use 99% free crap from the internet and then I have to jump through hoops to get it to play nice with the enterprise. Yeah I’m looking at you Boeing. 🙄
setnaffa
6 years ago
LOL… I don’t know about Boeing, per se; but 99 44% of wireless security cameras could be hacked by script-kiddies who were able to find ’em.
Or so I’ve been told. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. (There are youtube videos showing how, step by step I had to watch in my Cybersecurity training classes.)
One purposefully avoids actually doing some things to avoid “Locardian exchanges”…
But we should be shocked at how many fixed passwords and backdoors are engineered into IoT stuff. I won’t have it in my house. And not just because I don’t think videos of me in an unclothed state should be considered WMDs…
ChickenHead
6 years ago
Setnaffa, there are plenty of videos on the internet of you in an unclothed state…
…got the job done…
…but, admittedly, not my proudest fap.
Nonetheless… IoT stuff is crazy insecure from hackers… and, even if secured from them, it is, by design, insecure from corporate and government intrusion.
Everything is analysed. Those fitting a profile are scrutinized. Outliers are studied. The legal fiction of parallel construction is used to avoid constitutional protections…
…meaning that a traffic stop for illegal lane change rather than machine learning keyword analysis from your constantly-on streaming microphone alerted the government to the unusual amount of cash you tried to carry from point A to point B… we will be taking that… no charges pressed, as there was no crime… sue to get it back… have a nice day.
setnaffa
6 years ago
Very reassuring, CH, I guess you’re more into scars than I previously thought…
Still, one doesn’t want that type of video traumatizing children ..
Similar to Apple OS? Closer to Linux with an add-on app launcher. I set up a Linux Ubuntu build once, just to learn how to do it. I think Red Star uses a Linux build as it’s base. Red Hat for Red Star? Maybe. We have nerdier ROK Heads that probably know more about it.
There are many flavors of linux desktop environments in the free world and several of them look very MacOS-like.
I recall a while back that Red Star was based on the linux kernel. Even if they branched off of a snapshot of linux to start their product they are still at a disadvantage. Linux has thousands of very smart people all over the world working on its many layers. While North Korea may have squads of highly skilled hackers, I doubt they could marshal the brigades of skilled people needed maintain and patch a sophisticated, evolving and secure system.
My bet is it is very hackable.
Linux is a fork off System V and OSX is a fork off BSD (like Solaris).
The nork distro is crippleware and essentially has a builtin remote syslog that sends your activities to Party apparatchiks. It was covered in some Linux forum several months back; but I didn’t even dare to d/l and run in a VM on an air-gapped throwaway PC. I’m still hoping to get a better job than Walmart Greeter.
I’ve played with it on a VM that I just didn’t connect to the network with a hypervisor. It won’t give you root access and the etc/shadow directory is locked up. I want to run kali against it some time to try to crack the root password to get more info about what is going on. You can run a terminal session and the terminal session is basically redhat/fedora/centos type linux.
No need to crack any passwords.
Just find a configuration file you can modify which executes in root and slip it your custom list of configurations… like configuring your user account to have root access.
Use this:
find / -perm -o+w | grep /udev/
If you find anything without “permission denied”, you are in.
FYI: Red Star is based on Red Hat which is based on Fedora. It also comes with the NSA’s SELinux installed.
Thank you both.
Using *nix and Mac is like having sex with a muddy puddle.
You *could* but why bother? 😎
Smokes, you’ll need to ask Apple fanboys… all I know is based on last night’s presentation… I needed help from the music minister’s wife to change the desktop view to match the 40″ TV I was using as a second monitor. I don’t have that trouble with windows, ubuntu, mint, kali, or even parrot or sift. Of course, it might have been easier if they had adjusted the screen resolution down to 1920×1080 or I had brought my glasses…
For personal use whatever floats your boat but for biz hands down MS. Getting annoyed with all the cheap-o products that come out for *nix because the developers use 99% free crap from the internet and then I have to jump through hoops to get it to play nice with the enterprise. Yeah I’m looking at you Boeing. 🙄
LOL… I don’t know about Boeing, per se; but 99 44% of wireless security cameras could be hacked by script-kiddies who were able to find ’em.
Or so I’ve been told. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. (There are youtube videos showing how, step by step I had to watch in my Cybersecurity training classes.)
One purposefully avoids actually doing some things to avoid “Locardian exchanges”…
But we should be shocked at how many fixed passwords and backdoors are engineered into IoT stuff. I won’t have it in my house. And not just because I don’t think videos of me in an unclothed state should be considered WMDs…
Setnaffa, there are plenty of videos on the internet of you in an unclothed state…
…got the job done…
…but, admittedly, not my proudest fap.
Nonetheless… IoT stuff is crazy insecure from hackers… and, even if secured from them, it is, by design, insecure from corporate and government intrusion.
Everything is analysed. Those fitting a profile are scrutinized. Outliers are studied. The legal fiction of parallel construction is used to avoid constitutional protections…
…meaning that a traffic stop for illegal lane change rather than machine learning keyword analysis from your constantly-on streaming microphone alerted the government to the unusual amount of cash you tried to carry from point A to point B… we will be taking that… no charges pressed, as there was no crime… sue to get it back… have a nice day.
Very reassuring, CH, I guess you’re more into scars than I previously thought…
Still, one doesn’t want that type of video traumatizing children ..