Ostensibly, North Korea’s Internet experienced a complete outage Monday as the nation’s elite and well-connected could not access websites – the average citizen doesn’t have an Internet connection nor a device to browse the World Wide Web. It is now being reported that it has returned to normal.
Cybersecurity experts say that North Korea may have been the victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Since there are just four networks connecting the nation’s Intranet to the global Internet through China, North Korea is quite susceptible to a hacking or cyber infiltration.
The outage transpired as Sony has been in damage control after cyber attackers hacked the company’s computers and released various data pertaining to its staff, payrolls, stars and motion pictures. Sony was also prompted to cancel “The Interview” after the cyber hackers warned of 9/11-style attacks on cinemas that played the film.
The Obama administration and the FBI have blamed North Korea for the international incident, but Kim Jong-un and his officials have denied being behind any such attack. President Obama has said that he will soon issue an official response to North Korea over the matter. Two options being floated around include fresh economic sanctions or playing the country back on its U.S. terrorist watch list – the oppressive Asian country was removed from the list by the Bush administration over discussions regarding nuclear weapons.
Many had suspected United States officials as being involved in the latest incident in North Korea where the Internet went dark. However, Washington has confirmed it was not the culprit behind the downtime.
“We have no new information to share regarding North Korea today,” said Bernadette Meehan, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, in a response for comment to the Wall Street Journal. “If in fact North Korea’s Internet has gone down, we’d refer you to that government for comment.”
Although it is generating global headlines, the reality of the situation is that the impact of having zero access to the Internet would have really no effect on the state. As previously noted, out of the 24 million people residing in North Korea, only a few percent have the Internet. In fact, North Korea is one of the least connected countries in the world, even Afghanistan has more networks (370).
