38 North, a Washington-based North Korea monitoring group, released a report on Monday that suggests North Korean animators may be hired by Western companies to work on projects in defiance of international sanctions.
One of the projects mentioned in the report was Amazon Prime’s popular superhero series. invincible.
of report The file was based on a file that 38 North and cybersecurity firm Mandiant obtained from a North Korean cloud server late last year. The server, discovered by Boston-area amateur detective Nick Roy, appeared abandoned but was still accessible. The security software was not properly configured, allowing anyone to view the content without a password.
Ironically, North Korea uses such cloud servers because it wants to tightly control prisoners’ access to the internet. North Korean workers, even those in high-tech industries, do not have direct access to the world’s internet from the small electronic backwaters maintained by their paranoid rulers. Instead, data must flow in and out of several cloud servers, and its contents are controlled by political oversight.
Because this particular cloud server remained widely exposed to outside observers, 38 North and Mandiant allegedly spent some time monitoring the data flowing through it. A lot of what they saw was about animators receiving instructions. An external production company provided instructions in Chinese regarding changes to the appearance of anime characters.
Although the identity of the North Korean animation company could not be confirmed from the data on the cloud server, 38 North said it is known as April 26 Animation (SEK), North Korea’s “best animation company”. I suspected it was a studio. This studio produces most of North Korea’s domestic comics. Packed It cooperated with government propaganda and did outside work with Korean studios before sanctions made such arrangements impossible.
SEK was targeted by U.S. Treasury sanctions in 2016 as a state-owned enterprise (SOE) controlled by the North Korean government. Then the Ministry of Finance authorized Chinese companies continued to do business with SEK through front companies to provide North Korean companies with “low-cost labor.”
Mandiant and 38 North investigated server logs that suggest Chinese companies are still buying animation productions from SEK at cut-rate prices, and some of those Chinese companies are in turn buying animation products from the US, UK and Japan. We receive subcontracts from the studio.
The best known of these projects is that of Amazon Prime. invincible, which just finished airing its second season. The files on a North Korean cloud server appeared to be from season 3, and included frames that clearly showed the main character. Researchers also found documents on the server that explicitly referred to divisions of the production company.
Another project working on the server is: No, child of wonderan animated fantasy adventure series scheduled to air later this year on Max, formerly known as HBO Max.
“There is no evidence to suggest that the companies identified in the images knew that parts of the project were being subcontracted to North Korean animators,” 38 North noted. “In fact, the editorial comments on all files, including those related to U.S.-based animation, were written in Chinese, so it is likely that the contract arrangements were several steps downstream from the major producers.”
Ironically, the second season episode invincible It teased the shortcuts animation companies have to take to deliver shows on tight schedules and budgets.
The 38 North report recommended increased “due diligence” on outsourcing to avoid plans to defeat sanctions. The report cited a 2022 warning from the U.S. government that North Korean information technology workers are adept at impersonating residents of other countries and using virtual private network (VPN) technology to hide their true whereabouts. are doing. North Korea is also known to host network connections by simply bribing people in the United States to connect with American companies.
Mandiant researcher Michael Barnhart Confirmed Producers of the project told Reuters on Monday: invincible and Iyanu He probably didn’t know that he was receiving work from a North Korean animator. He expressed “strong belief” that the Chinese company outsourced the controversial animation to North Korea.
Barnhart noted that companies that unknowingly employ North Korean workers are not only violating sanctions, but also potentially becoming targets for North Korean hackers. Hackers are increasingly connected to North Korea’s nationally-owned enterprises.
A North Korean defector named Choi Sung-kook told Reuters that when he worked at SEK in the late 1990s, there was a department specializing in cooperation with foreign studios. He and many of his colleagues quit their jobs due to shockingly low wages (even by North Korean standards) and found better paying jobs in China.
The company behind Skybound invinciblesaid it had no knowledge of North Korea’s involvement in the program, but that it “takes the allegations seriously” and has launched a “thorough internal investigation” in addition to contacting “appropriate authorities.”
“Our policy is to strictly prohibit subcontracting to any third party without our express prior written consent, in which case consent will not be sought or granted. ” company Said in a social media post directed at fans. “We also require all service providers to fully comply with all applicable rules and regulations and prohibit the disclosure of materials by our service providers to third parties.”
Skybound referred to the 38 North/Mandiant report obliquely as “unconfirmed” in its post.
Official: “Familiar with this matter” Said CNN said Tuesday that it is a producer of Lion Forge Entertainment. Iyanu The show hired a Korean company to complete some of the animation, but severed ties after it was discovered that the Korean studio had subcontracted the work to other companies without proper permission. The South Korean studio specifically denied sending any work to North Korea.
