Communication Security
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North
Korea experiencing severe Internet outages
North Korea
experienced sweeping and progressively worse Internet outages extending into
Monday, with one computer expert saying the country’s online access is “totally
down.” The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the
U.S. government was responsible.
President Barack Obama
said Friday the U.S. government expected to respond to the hacking of Sony
Pictures Entertainment Inc., 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, and it was not immediately clear if the Internet connectivity problems
represented the retribution. The U.S. government regards its offensive cyber
operations as highly classified.
“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.
North Korea has
forcefully denied it was responsible for hacking into Sony. But the country has
for months condemned the “The Interview,” a Sony satirical comedy about a plot
to assassinate the North Korean leader. Sony canceled plans to release the
movie after a group of hackers made terroristic threats against theaters that
planned to show it.
North Korean diplomat
Kim Song, asked Monday about the Internet attack, told The Associated Press- “I
have no information.”
Ivan Simonovic, the
U.N. assistant secretary—general for human rights, told reporters he didn’t
want to speculate about the nature of the Internet outages but said he hoped it
would be “thoroughly investigated.”
Doug Madory, the
director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, an Internet performance company,
said Monday the problems began over the weekend and grew progressively worse to
the point that “North Korea’s totally down.”
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. 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.
With the current
outages, Madory said, “They have left the global Internet and they are gone
until they come back.”
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.
Given North Korea’s
limited connectivity and lack of Internet sophistication, it would be
relatively simple for a band of hacktivists to shut down online access, and it
should not be assumed that the U.S. government had any part, said Dan Holden,
director of security research at Arbor Networks.
“Anyone of us that was
upset because we couldn’t watch the movie, you could do that. Their Internet is
just not that sophisticated,” Holden said.
Madory said one benign
explanation for the problem might be that a router suffered a software glitch,
though a cyber—attack involving North Korea’s Internet service was also a
possibility. Routing instabilities are not uncommon, but instead of getting
better, as one might expect, “it’s getting worse, getting progressively
degraded,” Madory said.
“This doesn’t fit that
profile,” of an ordinary routing problem, he said. “This shows something getting progressively
worse over time.”
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