Archive for December 22, 2014

Twitter Has Exploded With Jokes About No Internet In North Korea

Posted in Commentary with tags , on December 22, 2014 by itnerd

I love Twitter because I can not only find out when something bad happens in the world far faster than with conventional news outlets, but people will make fun of it as well. I cite the following as examples that are related to the great North Korean Internet outage:

https://twitter.com/KimJongUnno/status/547206694280134656

https://twitter.com/SeasonOfBytes/status/547207263107031040

https://twitter.com/bobmeyer667/status/547207220987850754

https://twitter.com/Grey280/status/547207143099990016

https://twitter.com/DanielJ_Film/status/547207103144681472

https://twitter.com/L_B_D_/status/547207043934068737

https://twitter.com/itscedsworld/status/547206323008704512

https://twitter.com/jm_IlIl/status/547205943407439872

Clearly, people on Twitter are delighting in the fact that North Korea has Internet issues right now.

Leave a comment »

Apple Releases Patch To Fix Critical Vulnerability In OS X

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 22, 2014 by itnerd

Apple today released a patch to address a critical vulnerability with the Network Time Protocol service in OS X. The Google Security Team found the vulnerability last week and the critical nature of the vulnerability was highlighted by the U.S. Government on Friday. The vulnerability has the potential to allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code using the privileges of the NTPD (Network Time Protocol Daemon) process. In English, the same service that sets the date and time on your Mac may allow someone to do stuff to your Mac remotely. That’s not good.

The update is for Yosemite, Mavericks, and Mountain Lion users and can be found via Software Update or via the links below:

I’d advise anybody who owns a Mac that runs the above operating systems to install this patch ASAP.

Leave a comment »

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

Posted in Commentary with tags , on December 22, 2014 by itnerd

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.

Leave a comment »