World News – According to the New York Times, North
Korea lost it’s already struggling internet connection. While this could be as a result of a normal
failure – or Pyongyang’s preemptive measure to forestall an impeding attack – there
are chances that this was U.S sponsored DDOS attack.
The attack happened on Monday,
hours after President Obama’s declaration that the U.S would take a “proportional
response” to the “cybervandalism” orchestrated against Sony Pictures.
The internet connection in North Korea began to slow
down over the weekend as its officials denied role in Sony attack and demanded
to be part of the investigation on the incident – a request that was flatly
rejected by the U.S. By Monday, Internet
connection had completely failed.
U.S officials who are actively pursuing ways of
preventing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) from sending malicious codes to other countries,
including discussions with the China (provides telecommunications connections
to North Korea), declined to talk about the monday failure.
Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman, said on
Monday, “We aren’t going to
discuss, you know, publicly operational details about the possible response
options”. “As we implement our
responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen,” she added.
It is not clear
whether the connection had been overloaded, cut, or attacked. Experts caution that there could be many
possibilities including an attempt by Pyongyang to prevent an attack by taking systems
offline.
According to Chris
Nicholson, Akamai’s spokesperson, it is particularly hard to pinpoint the
problem given official internet protocol addresses in DPRK only stand at
1,024, thus only giving a trickle of information. In comparison the United
States has billions of addresses.
By Tuesday morning,
the few connections available to outside world, which are only accessed by the
military and the elite, were still offline. However, a few connections began to comeback,
after more than 10 hours of internet blackout.
North Korea’s
connections to the outside world are provided by the State run Star Joint
Ventures, and almost all of them are run through China. Experts are also
looking at a possibility where China simply cut off its stubborn neighbor.
Internet connection
to the DPRK begun to wobble on Friday, with experts alleging a DDOS attack
(distribution of denial of service, in which attackers flood a network with
traffic until it collapses under load). If the attack is American in origin, then
this would be a rare instance in which the U.S disables another nation’s
internet connection.
Documents released by
Snowden shows that the U.S has placed “implants” on strategic places around the
world, including network connections to specific computers.
The spokeswoman for
the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Hua Chunying, said it was very early to know if
the Sony attack originated from North Korea but reaffirmed China’s strong
opposition to cyberattacks and cyberterrorism.
Photo Credit:José Fernandes Jr
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