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UPDATE II:
After having been down or severely degraded for about nine hours, North Korea’s internet is coming back to life.
But when the sun rose in North Korea on Tuesday morning, the few connections to the outside world — available only to the elite, the military, and North Korea’s prodigious propaganda machine — were still out.
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As the morning wore on, however, some of the connections began to come back after a blackout of nearly 10 hours, though there was still very little traffic, according to CloudFlare, an Internet company in San Francisco.
The briefness of the outage suggests that the attack on North Korea’s Internet was not state-sponsored, an analyst says.
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North Korea’s Internet came back on Tuesday, after about nine hours of darkness that tore from the hermit nation its already fragile connection to the global web.
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Dyn Research, an Internet performance analyst, put the total downtime at nine-hours and 31-minutes, while Internet company Cloudflare calculated a darkness period of nine hours and 50-minutes.
UPDATE I:
The New York Times is reporting, “North Korea’s already tenuous links to the Internet went completely dark on Monday after days of instability, in what Internet monitors described as one of the worst North Korean network failures in years.”
Whether this loss of service is the “proportional response” — or part of the response — President Obama pledged last week as a result of the recent cyber attacks on Sony pictures is not clear.
The Times:
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.
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“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.
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North Korea’s addresses are managed by Star Joint Venture, the state-run Internet provider, which routes many of those connections through China Unicom, China’s state-owned telecommunications company.
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By Monday morning, those addresses had gone dark for over an hour.
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CloudFlare, an Internet company based in San Francisco, confirmed Monday that North Korea’s Internet access was “toast.” A large number of connections had been withdrawn, “showing that the North Korean network has gone away,” Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s founder, wrote in an email.
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Although the failure might have been caused by maintenance problems, Mr. Madory and others said that such problems most likely would not have caused such a prolonged, widespread loss.
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The loss of service is not likely to affect the vast majority of North Koreans, who have no access to the Internet. The biggest impact would be felt by the country’s elite, state-run media channels and its propagandists, as well as its cadre of cyberwarriors.
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If the attack was American in origin — something the United States would probably never acknowledge — it would be a rare effort by the United States to attack a nation’s Internet connections. Until now, most operations by the United States have amounted to cyberespionage, mostly to collect defense information or the communications of terrorism suspects.
During an afternoon State Department daily press briefing, Deputy spokesperson, Marie Harf, had this answer to a reporter’s question on the issue:
…as the President said, we are considering a range of options in response. We aren’t going to discuss publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen. So I can’t confirm those reports, but in general, that’s what the President has spoken to.
Original Post:
When back in June, North Korea threatened “resolute and merciless” response against the United States if the comedy “The Interview” was released, labeling the comedy “reckless US provocative insanity” and saying it will consider its release an “act of war,” many of us took it with a grain of salt.
The Interview is a comedy directed by Evan Goldberg, in which Seth Rogen and James Franco play celebrity TV journalists who secure an exclusive interview with the North Korean leader, but are then recruited by the CIA to assassinate him.
The film was slated for release in U.S. theaters this month.
About three weeks ago, Sony Pictures’ computers were hacked, huge amounts of internal data released and warnings issued about attacks on movie theaters that would play The Interview.
As a result, the top five theater circuits in North America — Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark, Carmike Cinemas and Cineplex Entertainment — have decided not to play Sony’s The Interview.
“Due to the wavering support of the film The Interview by Sony Pictures, as well as the ambiguous nature of any real or perceived security threats, Regal Entertainment Group has decided to delay the opening of the film in our theatres,” Regal said in a statement, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Suspicion for the cyber attacks and the threats on movie theaters was directed towards North Korea.
The person or people claiming responsibility call themselves the “Guardians of Peace,” or GOP. Early reports suggested North Korea was behind the GOP, and there’s been some evidence of that. But North Korea has denied responsibility for the hack, and it’s equally possible the assailants planted clues leading to North Korea as a distraction.
Within the last hour, CNN has reported that, “[a]ccording to U.S. investigators, the North Korean government was behind the cyber-attack on Sony Pictures that ultimately led to the cancelation ofThe Interview’s theatrical release:
“U.S. investigators determined that the attack against Sony was the work of hackers working on behalf of the North Korean government,” Perez reported, saying he expects there will be an official announcement from U.S. government sources tomorrow. “Obviously, you know, nothing happens in North Korea without orders from the leadership of the regime. They control the internet there, so there’s no way this attack could have been done by anyone other than if it was ordered by the leadership of that country.”
American intelligence officials have concluded that the North Korean government was “centrally involved” in the recent attacks on Sony Pictures’s computers, a determination reached just as Sony on Wednesday canceled its release of the comedy, which is based on a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.
Senior administration officials, who would not speak on the record about the intelligence findings, said the White House was still debating whether to publicly accuse North Korea of what amounts to a cyberterrorism campaign. Sony’s decision to cancel release of “The Interview” amounted to a capitulation to the threats sent out by hackers this week that they would launch attacks, perhaps on theaters themselves, if the movie was released.
Officials said it was not clear how the White House would decide to respond to North Korea.
Stay tuned for the formal U.S. government announcement, expected tomorrow, and, more important, for what the U.S. reaction will be to this flagrant attempt — apparently successful — to use fear and threats to silence U.S. media and to manipulate the behavior of Americans. Is it an act of war?
flag graphic via shutterstock.com
