Internet in North Korea Resumed

[RoadWarrior]

The country’s Internet network seems to be back after a long outage, amid a row with the United States over a hack against Sony Pictures that the US has blamed on North Korea.


The security experts point out that it remains unknown whether a cyber-attack caused the outage, and if so who might have been behind it. The American tech firms that monitored the North Korean web network, accounting for just 1,000 web addresses and being accessible to a handful of elite officials, confirmed that it has suffered a concerted DDoS attack. The outage caused the shutdown for such sites as the official Korean Central News Agency and the Rodong Sinmun newspaper.

It remains unknown who carried out a cyber attack, and the searches are complicated by the fact that shutting down the country’s web network would not be difficult, because it only has 1,024 IP addresses, though there are 25 million people in North Korea. It has only one ISP and one connection to the outside world, via China.

Anyway, the US is suspected of the attack, because its President promised to respond to the hacking of Sony Pictures. The row between the two countries centered on the Sony’s movie The Interview, a film with a plot to assassinate the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.

North Korea has reacted with fury to the movie, but denied any involvement into the hacking of Sony Pictures. Recently, the country issued unspecified threats of action against the United States, claiming that Washington was heavily involved in devising the plot of the controversial movie.

There is no exact statistics on how many people in North Korea are able to access to the web. However, it is believed to run to just a few people among the political elite. Although mobile phones spread across the country, they can’t make overseas calls or access the Internet.