by REERA YOO | @reeraboo
editor@charactermedia.com
North Korea’s Internet connection has been hit with outages and is currently offline, according to the New York Times. The network failure comes a few days after President Obama vowed to retaliate against North Korea for hacking Sony Pictures.
According to Bloomberg, North Korea has four official Internet networks that route through China, all of which first experienced unstable connection late Friday and went completely dark on Monday. Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at the cybsecurity firm Dyn Research, said the outage was “out of the ordinary” and emphasized that maintenance problems would most likely not have caused such a widespread loss of connection.
“I haven’t seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before,” said Madory, according to the North Korea Tech blog. “Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently.”
The outage comes as China is investigating allegations against North Korea over the Sony hack attack. The Obama administration has recently sought China’s help in blocking North Korea’s ability to wage cyberattacks—the first step toward the “proportional response” Obama pledged.
While it is possible that the U.S. might have been involved in the disruption of North Korea’s Internet connection, the White House has reportedly declined to consider a “demonstration strike” against North Korean cyberspace targets.
Cybsecurity experts have claimed that there are several possible causes for the network failure, according to the New York Times. North Korea could be preemptively shutting down its Internet access to prevent U.S. counterattack. Vigilante hackers could also be responsible for the outage.
As most North Koreans do not have access to the Internet, the blackout will only affect the country’s elite, state-run media outlets, propagandists and its cyberwarfare divisions.
Photo courtesy of Rebooting Liberty
