By Ankit Panda
The U.S. government probably wasn’t responsible for the North Korean Internet outage.
On Monday, North Korea experienced prolonged network outages that effectively severed the already-isolated state from the Internet at large. The outage came shortly after the United States formally leveled accusations against the regime in Pyongyang for backing the hackers that broke into Sony Pictures’ servers and threatened to attack U.S. theatergoers should Sony move ahead with the planned release of The Interview – a comedy featuring the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as its climax. The North Korean outage also comes after the U.S. government promised that it would seek to respond “proportionately” to what U.S. President Barack Obama described as an act of “cyber vandalism.”
As of this writing, North Korea’s Internet access has returned after a nine-hour outage. Global network monitoring experts described the scale of the outage as serious, with one analyst at Dyn Research telling CNN that the outage was as if “North Korea got erased from the global map of the Internet.” As of yet, no one has formally claimed responsibility, but most observers are suggesting that the outage could have been orchestrated by the United States as part of its promised response. The U.S. government, as expected, is remaining tight-lipped on the matter. ”We aren’t going to discuss — you know — 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,” Marie Harf, a U.S. State Department spokesperson, told reporters.
Read the full story at The Diplomat