North Korea is experiencing a ‘Massive Internet Outage’
Following the Guardians of Peace hack attack against Sony, which the US publicly blames on North Korea (something many people don’t believe), President Obama publicly threatened a “proportional response” against the North Koreans. Now that North Korea is suffering one of its “worst internet outages in recent memory,” many are wondering if it payback from the United States.
“I haven’t seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before,” said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research. “Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently.” [North Korea Tech]
The New York Times also confirms that North Korea’s internet has gone down.
North Korea does very little commercial or government business over the Internet. The country officially has 1,024 Internet protocol addresses, though the actual number may be somewhat higher. By comparison, the United States has billions of addresses.
North Korea’s addresses are managed by Star Joint Venture, the state-run Internet provider, which routes many of those connections through China Unicom, China’s state-owned telecommunications company.
By Monday morning, those addresses had gone dark for over an hour.
CloudFlare, an Internet company based in San Francisco, confirmed Monday that North Korea’s Internet access was “toast.” A large number of connections had been withdrawn, “showing that the North Korean network has gone away,” Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s founder, wrote in an email. [NYTimes]
Reports suggest that Sony was planning to release The Interview on Crackle, which Sony later denied. Independent theaters wrote an open letter wanting to screen the movie and BitTorrent also offered their services. Meanwhile, a Sony lawyer told Meet the Press that the film will be distributed.
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