Washington – North Korea experienced sweeping and progressively worse Internet outages extending into Monday, with one computer expert saying the country’s online access is “totally down.” The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the U.S. government was responsible.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
President Barack Obama said Friday the U.S. government expected to respond to the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., which he described as an expensive act of “cyber vandalism” that he blamed on North Korea. Obama did not say how the U.S. might respond, and it was not immediately clear if the Internet connectivity problems represented the retribution. The U.S. government regards its offensive cyber operations as highly classified.
“We aren’t going to discuss, you know, publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in anyway except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.
North Korea has forcefully denied it was responsible for hacking into Sony.
Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, a company that studies Internet connectivity, said the problems were discovered over the weekend and grew progressively worse to the point that “North Korea’s totally down.”
“They have left the global Internet and they are gone until they come back,” he said.
He said one benign explanation for the problem was that a router suffered a software glitch, though a cyber-attack involving North Korea’s Internet service was also a possibility.
Routing instabilities are not uncommon, but this particular outage has gone on for hours and was getting worse instead of better, Madory said.
“This doesn’t fit that profile,” of an ordinary routing problem, he said. “This shows something getting progressively worse over time.”
Wow. What retaliation. Sad
North Korea provides Internet?
They probably ran out of AOL free 1000 hour cd’s.
OK, so let’s analyze this: Sony started. They taunted NK with the film’s content. Was anyone expecting NK to keep quiet? Duhhhh….
It’s easy for Obama to say that Sony should not have backed down while suffering cyber-terries form NK.
But why doesn’t he put his money where his mouth is?
Why didn’t Obama reach out to help take care of the Sony loss as an act of terrorism against the USA not unlike the threat of Terror on all other fronts which the Feds foot the bill.
If Obama really wants us not to back down, let him shell out some $ and let Obama pay Millions of $ for Sony’s film losses and pay for THE film which Sony withdrew.
Let Obama pay millions of $ for the film against NK and distribute it free to the entire world to see, if Obama really wants to put his $ where his mouth is.
Let Obama fund 100 more such films against NK to teach them a lesson and to show NK that if they resort to terror to suppress a film it will result in 100 times more such films.
But Obama does nothing to help Sony, yet criticizes their only “self defense” to quit.
What a “HERO”, Obama is!
A dozen or more heads of NK top IT dept. Are to be cut off – many families will be thrown in the infamous gulags for the terrible shame of not being able to have the Internet back up quickly!
I don’t have any confidence in this Doug Madory guy being competent. He can’t express a simple thought without resorting to the meaningless tautology.
“they are gone until they come back”
No, Doug is not a man of high IQ.
Hah this is great! The North Koreans ban 90% of the internet and we took down the other 10%