When you think of North Korea, the first thing that springs to mind is probably not a well-featured tablet PC. But that's just what researchers at the Chaos Communication Congress hacking festival revealed on Tuesday.

Called Woolim, this tablet is designed to limit the distribution of contraband media, track its users, and generally act as a propaganda platform for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. “It's pretty locked down,” researcher Florian Grunow told in an interview on Tuesday. Grunow presented the research along with co-researchers Niklaus Schiess and Manuel Lubetzki. Woolim is a small, white Android device that looks like a fairly standard tablet.

North Korea’s homegrown computer operating system mirrors its political one – marked by a high degree of paranoia and invasive snooping on users, according to two German researchers.

Their investigation, the deepest yet into the country’s Red Star OS, illustrates the challenges Pyongyang faces in trying to embrace the benefits of computing and the internet while keeping a tight grip on ideas and culture. The operating system is not just the pale copy of western ones that many have assumed, said experts of the German IT security company ERNW, who downloaded the software from a website outside North Korea and explored the code in detail.

The trail that led American officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth.

Spurred by growing concern about North Korea’s maturing capabilities, the American spy agency drilled into the Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the outside world, picked through connections in Malaysia favored by North Korean hackers and penetrated directly into the North with the help of South Korea and other American allies.

The Sony breach certainly seems to be the gift that keeps on giving this holiday season. And if the commonly accepted narrative reflects the truth, this whole nightmare scenario stems from what promised to be a puerile comedy titled “The Interview.”

The premise of the movie revolves around a pair of journalists who are granted a rare interview with North Korean supreme leader, Kim Jong-Un, and the subsequent plot to assassinate the Hermit Kingdom’s despotic dictator. Sony, having clearly failed to learn its lesson after attackers hacked its PlayStation Network, is the main character in yet another serious and humiliating security incident.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service has alleged that North Korean cyber army has infected a lot of smartphones. Victims reportedly downloaded infected applications from websites assuming that they were games but contained malicious code.

However, NIS has not revealed whether the infected devices actually suffered any damage. Intelligence officials countered the threat by removing the malicious apps from the infected websites and devices, and securing them with advanced computer vaccines. South Korea has frequently accused North Korea of launching cyber attacks on its tech-savvy citizens, media outlets, and government establishments.