North Korea’s internet access is “toast” (Developing)
Cybershenanigans possible.
Could it be that the United States has finally hit back against North Korea’s cyberaggression?
All 1,024 of North Korea’s Internet protocol addresses have gone dark, and internet monitors are calling the outage one of the worst network failures in years.
From the Washington Post:
The connectivity problems are coming just days after President Obama warned of a “proportional response” to North Korea, which is suspected of breaking into Sony’s network in a major cyber hack. It’s not yet known whether the United States is responsible for the downtime. But according to Dyn Research — which earlier this year bought the respected network analysis firm Renesys — North Korea’s Internet is currently showing unusual amounts of instability.
…
Is this an attack? The chances aren’t zero, considering that the few North Koreans who can actually get online tend to be government and military officials. Even if the outages are the result of somebody’s deliberate act, proving that the United States did it would be difficult.
According to the New York Times, if this was us (and it had better be us, even if we’ll never admit it) it would mean that US intelligence is trying something completely different. Normally, American cyberwarfare (that we know about) goes the “espionage” route and focuses on data grabs.
As North Korea Tech points out, North Korea’s connection to the rest of the world does tend to suffer from periodic outages. As of now, none of the major “hacking collectives” (think Anonymous) have taken credit for the attack, so it could be something as simple as an unplugged router or…you know…some dust. In an outlet.
So it could be that.
Sure.
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Comments
There’s a joke in here somewhere about net neutrality.
The Obama administration wasn’t the only entity who is angry about the Sony hack… there are a lot of “White Hat” hackers who specialize in revenge activity; usually against spammers and online conmen. But I could easily see them turning a couple of skilled guys against North Korea for an afternoon.
“Dear North Korea… this is what happens when America’s Youth get bored. Maybe you ought not block entertaining movies and such. Just sayin’.”
Given how little access they had to begin with, if this is a deliberate act by an outside party, I seriously doubt it will incovenience NK terribly much. An alternative theory is that they took their own network down, or put it all behind a firewall, in order to prevent cyber retaliation.
Possible, but unlikely. Taking a whole country’s internet off-line is no small feat. Further, unless it was a planned outage, it would create a lot of havoc with any interconnected infrastructure.
Naw, just jiggle a couple of cables and restart the modem…
The timing is the only reason to suspect we did anything. Lots of possibilities, hope it was us. I hope it doesn’t give away any needed capability.
“All 1,024 of North Korea’s Internet protocol addresses…”
Wow, just f’n wow…
I know of floors in medium-sized buildings that have more public IP addresses than that.
Firewalls, routers, gateways, or whatever may be operating behind those addresses…that is an astonishing degree of (external) information control and isolation.
By the way, professor, if you happen to read, the comments on your donation thread seem to be disabled. I made a small donation and thought I would encourage others to do the same, but no go…
And both of N Korea’s internet users assumed that their ISP was on the blink again and didn’t notice a thing.
tend to suspect this is coincidence.
I had forgotten they only had 1 ipv4 block assigned to them.
know they use a bunch of ip addresses assigned to china though.
us purposely shutting them down would make it harder to deal with them diplomatically which they seem to be trying to do.
as I type this watching something on dvr and ad for the interview pops up LOL
Have they called customer service?
LOL
Oh you want them to be treated to inhuman torture!
LOL
If we did it, watch for Obama to brag about it. He messed up Stuxnet and the bin Laden raid intel, because he just has to let everyone know how awesome he is.
Most of NK thinks the internet has to do with shared fishing, but a few nerds might be punished for embarrassing the little big man.
This would be about Obama’s speed.
Since Democrats have completely gutted human intelligence gathering over the last 40 years, we rely ever more on electronic and satellite means.
In a closed society such as the PRK, infiltrating their internet was one of the few options to gather information on the regime’s plans.
Naturally, as with the Cuban embargo, Obama would give away the only tool we have for nothing.
The evolving consensus of opinion is that they dis-connected themselves from the web, to prevent retaliation from the US, or news of today’s United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss North Korea’s human rights violations, and the threat to charge them at the International Criminal Court. Or to make sure a copy of the Sony movie wasn’t surreptitiously streamed to North Korea over the web.
Don’t worry. Comcast will be out to fix the problem in 3-5 business days. North Korea should have their credit card ready and be ready to let them into the country to perform such work as needed to restore services, but at this time, have you thought about upgrading to our fibre service for only a few million dollars more a month?
Well. Comcast proudly reports all the time that it believes in Net Neutrality and they have the contract to prove it.
this is gonna cut into somebodies porn watching time.
It is probably a good idea not to mess too much with a nut case that has nuclear weapons. The same applies to North Korea too.
I think it would have been better if we had gifted those fellows with a version of Stuxnet for their nuclear weapons facilities and chemical weapons labs.