Prominent North Korean
websites were back online Tuesday after an hours-long shutdown that led
to speculation by some researchers and web watchers that the country's
Internet connections could be under cyberattack.
South Korean officials
told the Associated Press that Internet access to the North's official
Korean Central News Agency and the Rodong Sinmun newspaper were working
normally Tuesday after being inaccessible earlier.
Those sites are the main channels for official North Korea news, with servers located abroad.
The outage came less
than a week after the U.S. vowed an unspecified response to a massive
hacking attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment over the release of
the comedy film "The Interview." The plot of the comedy centers on the
assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, leading to widespread
speculation that the country was responsible for the attack. Late last
week, the FBI publicly blamed North Korea in the incident, though
Pyongyang has denied involvement.
The White House and the
State Department on Monday declined to say whether the U.S. government
had any role in North Korea's Internet problems.
"We have no new
information to share regarding North Korea today," White House National
Security Council spokesperson Bernadette Meehan told Fox News. "If in
fact North Korea’s Internet has gone down, we’d refer you to that
government for comment."
North Korean diplomat Kim Song, asked Monday about the Internet attack, told The Associated Press: "I have no information."
North Korea is one of
the least connected countries in the world. Few North Koreans have
access to computers, and even those who do are typically able to connect
only to a domestic intranet that works with its own browsers, search
engine and email programs, according to South Korea's Unification
Ministry.
Though North Korea is
equipped for broadband Internet, only a small, approved segment of the
population has any access to the World Wide Web. More than a million
people, however, are now using mobile phones in North Korea. The network
covers most major cities but users cannot call outside the country or
receive calls from outside.
Doug Madory, the
director of Internet analysis at New Hampshire-based Dyn Research, a
company that studies Internet connectivity, said the problems were
discovered over the weekend and grew progressively worse to the point
that "North Korea's totally down."
"They have left the global Internet and they are gone until they come back," he said.
He said one benign
explanation for the problem was that a router may have suffered a
software glitch, though a cyberattack involving North Korea's Internet
service was also a possibility.
Routing instabilities
are not uncommon, but this particular outage had gone on for hours and
was getting worse instead of better, Madory said.
"This doesn't fit that
profile," of an ordinary routing problem, he said. "This shows something
getting progressively worse over time."
Another Internet
technology service, Arbor Networks, which protects companies against
hacker attacks, said its monitoring detected denial-of-service attacks
aimed at North Korea's infrastructure starting Saturday and persisting
Monday. Such attacks transmit so much spurious data traffic to Internet
equipment that it becomes overwhelmed, until the attacks stop or the
spurious traffic can be filtered and discarded to allow normal
connections to resume.
President Obama said
Friday that the U.S. government expected to respond "proportionately" to
the hacking of Sony, which he described as an expensive act of "cyber
vandalism" that he blamed on North Korea. Obama did not say how the U.S.
might respond.
"We aren't going to
discuss, you know, publicly operational details about the possible
response options or comment on those kind of reports in anyway except to
say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not
be seen," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said last week.culled
from FOXNEWS
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