North Korea's internet appears to be under mass cyber attack
Internet connectivity between North Korea and the outside world, though never robust to begin with, is currently suffering one of its worst outages in recent memory, suggesting that the country may be enduring a mass cyber attack a few days after President Obama warned the US would launch a "proportional response" to North Korea's hack against Sony.
"I haven't seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before," said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at the cybsecurity firm Dyn Research, according to Martyn Williams of the excellent blog North Korea Tech. Madory explained, "Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn't be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently."
While it's entirely possible that this is due to run-of-the-mill maintenance or technical issues, it's hard to miss that the outage comes just days after President Obama condemned North Korea as responsible for the massive cyberattack against Sony and pledged a "proportional" US response.
The outage also comes as China is investigating the accusations against North Korea over the Sony hack. North Korea's internet access is wired through China, which gives China more or less direct control over North Korea's access to the outside world.
Yes, North Korea does have the Internet. Very few citizens have access to it, it's slow, and the connection is shaky. But it allows North Korea's state media, its propagandists, and its vaunted cyberwarfare divisions a way to access the outside world, as well as ways for sympathetic Koreans in South Korea and Japan to link up with the Hermit Kingdom. The country is wired through China, North Korea's northern neighbor and sole ally.
Why could this be happening? Did the US launch a cyber attack against North Korea in retaliation for the Sony hack? On the one hand, the White House has reportedly ruled out any sort of "demonstration strike" cyber reprisal against North Korean internet targets. On the other, that does not necessarily rule out a possible American effort to simply disrupt or sever North Korea's connection to the outside internet, if only to block future attacks.
It's also possible that China is attempting to shut down North Korea's internet connections with the outside world, perhaps so as to avoid future North Korean attacks that would embarrass China. While China is North Korea's patron, it also typically seeks to tamp down the Hermit Kingdom's provocations, which Beijing rightly sees as bad for Chinese interests.
Vigilante hackers could also theoretically be responsible, perhaps in an attempt to punish North Korea for the Sony attack, although past efforts by groups such as Anonymous have been spectacular failures.
While it's possible that North Korea is preemptively closing off its own internet access, hoping to prevent or preempt any US reprisal attacks, that would not explain why connectivity occasionally pops back up, suggesting that either an outage or a deliberate attack is the cause.
Could North Korea really have pulled off these attacks?
Can North Korea — one of the poorest, most isolated countries in the world, a place where personal computers are banned and the internet does not officially exist — possibly be that good at hacking? Even some in the hacking community have been asking this question.
The answer is, yes, North Korea really is that good at hacking. North Korean government hackers have launched a number of successful, high-profile attacks in recent years — as well as an unknown number of lower-profile ones. The attacks have been growing in scale and sophistication as North Korea ratchets up its largely military-run cyber warfare program.
The first known attacks came in 2009 against South Korean and US web sites. While those attacks did little damage, they did alert US officials to the growing problem of cyber warfare. Since then, North Korea has launched increasingly sophisticated hacks against South Korea, including an attack in 2014 that seeded thousands of cell phones with an Angry Birds-style game containing malware that eventually gave the hackers control of those phones.
North Korea keeps its own population offline, but its hackers are thought to be trained in China and Russia and are given higher status and better lifestyles within the country. According to defectors who have fled the country, one of the main reasons for the country's focus on cyber warfare is that it's much less expensive than traditional military weapons like planes, tanks, and bombs. And as the world grows ever more interconnected, those hackers can have a more devastating effect.
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