North Korea’s limited internet connection was disrupted for over nine hours last night in what is suspected to be a targeted attack on the country’s infrastructure. That being said, experts do not believe that this is the work of a US retaliation against the Sony hack; mostly because any hacker worth his salt could easily bring down the four networks that operate in the country.
The complete outage began at midnight local time, with what appears to be all internet connects out of North Korea being severed. No one has claimed responsibility for the possible attack, and the US government has stated that it is not involved. However, the outage happened suspiciously close to President Barack Obama’s speech in which he vowed a proportional response to the attack on Sony Pictures; which the US is blaming on North Korea.
Dan Holden, director of security research for Arbor Networks Inc., told Bloomberg that the incident appears to be a simple DDoS attack; and that any hacker can spend US$200 to pull it off. This is mainly due to the limited coverage and reach of the North Korean internet, which is only available to a select few. Holden also said that it is unlikely to have impacted any operations in the communist regime, and looks to be more symbolic than anything else.
[Source: Bloomberg]
