The Internet is out in North Korea
According to the New York Times, North Korea is now suffering a complete Internet blackout. What appears to be a Denial of Service Attack (or DDOS attack) is targeting North Korean routers, and all of North Koreas 1,200 IP addresses have gone dark.
North Korea’s already tenuous links to the Internet went completely dark on Monday after days of instability, in what Internet monitors described as one of the worst North Korean network failures in years.
The loss of service came just days after President Obama pledged that the United States would launch a “proportional response” to the recent attacks on Sony Pictures, which government officials have linked to North Korea. While an attack on North Korea’s networks was suspected, there was no definitive evidence of it
Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, an Internet performance management company, said that North Korean Internet access first became unstable late Friday. The situation worsened over the weekend, and by Monday, North Korea’s Internet was completely offline.
“Their networks are under duress,” Mr. Madory said. “This is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers,” he said, referring to a distributed denial of service attack, in which attackers flood a network with traffic until it collapses under the load.
An Internet company executive the Times spoke to noted that the entire North Korean network was, in no uncertain terms, “toast.”
There is no indication whether this is an American attack, though Anonymous has been issuing threats over the last several days, alluding to a possible organized attack in North Korea. It would, of course, be rare for us to engage in all-out cyberwarfare, and it would be even rarer for us to engage in all-out cyberwarfare after our president took decisive action in issuing a sternly worded demand to North Korea to admit they broke Sony’s Internet and pay for what they’ve done out of their allowance.
