North Korea’s Internet Is Down…. Did They Forget To Pay Their Bill?

It appears that as I type this, North Korea is experiencing an nationwide outage of their Internet service. Yes, North Korea is on the Internet and has been for a few years now. Here’s what The New York Times has to say about this:

Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, an Internet performance management company, said that North Korean Internet access first became unstable late Friday. The situation worsened over the weekend, and by Monday, North Korea’s Internet was completely offline.

“Their networks are under duress,” Mr. Madory said. “This is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers,” he said, referring to a distributed denial of service attack, in which attackers flood a network with traffic until it collapses under the load.

The hermit kingdom as North Korea is also known as has four connections into the country (by contrast, the US has about 150,000) that route mostly through China. So it would be somewhat easy for a targeted attack to take the entire country offline. Now, the average citizen in North Korea doesn’t have access to the Internet. However, the elite of this country will likely not be able to watch cat videos on YouTube and will plead to their supreme leader Kim Jong Un to get them hooked up as quickly as possible.

Could it be payback for the Sony hack? That’s a very good question we may not get an answer to. But it will be interesting to see how North Korea responds to this.

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