It's Alarmingly Easy To Take North Korea's Internet Offline

Business Insider ^ | 12/23/2014 | Armin Rosen

[SeekAndFind]

The Sony hacking saga took an even stranger turn yesterday when North Korea lost internet access for roughly 9 1/2 hours. The cause of the outage can't be conclusively determined.

But it appears likely that the country's paltry web infrastructure — which consists of a mere four networks and just over 1,000 IP addresses — was the target of a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) conceivably motivated in some way by the events surrounding last month's Sony breach and the controversy surrounding The Interview.

The North Korean outage was both an utterly empty gesture and evidence of how nearly anyone can spark a potential international incident if sufficiently motivated to do so.

There are few countries where the internet is less embedded in daily life than North Korea, where web access is severely curtailed and internet outages have almost no practical impact on the vast majority of the population. And the country's network is so underdeveloped, and so unprotected, that any actor capable of launching a moderately-sized DDOS attack could potentially take it down.

"The pool of people who could do this is prohibitively large," Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Dyn Research and the analyst who first spotted the outage, told Business Insider when asked to speculate as to who could be responsible.

[SWAMPSNIPER]

[TigersEye]

It's Alarmingly Easy To Take North Korea's Internet Offline

I love that app!

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

Rattle rattle rattle that cage. Eventually all these juvenile pranks are going to lead to catastrophe. Then who will be laughing?

[Ray76]

Alarming?

[dainbramaged]

Are they still on dial-up?

[Travis McGee]

Mike Leyton's actual password was sonyml3.

[moovova]

[Travis McGee]

"Rattle rattle rattle that cage. Eventually all these juvenile pranks are going to lead to catastrophe. Then who will be laughing?"

We may never know what hit us, if we wake up and the power is out. And stays out.

Click the pic to the full-text Free Republic thread.

Alas, Brave New Babylon 60-second Youtube trailer

[Chode]

[kingu]

Oh, sure, you can knock out the *hahahahaha* civilian internet in North Korea, but since the hackers can easily relocate to China (as they have in the past) or any number of other nations (which they have in the past) or use satellite communications (which they have in the past), it does not ‘solve’ the issue of them attacking targets.

[Bubba_Leroy]

North Korea has a very secure backup system that would be almost impossible to hack.

The entire North Korean Internet is backed up on a half dozen 5.25 inch floppy disks that Kim Jong Un keeps in a cigar box in his underwear drawer.

[MeshugeMikey]

The Norks SOLE Submarine?

[Vendome]

[SeekAndFind]

[McGruff]

I no can roggin.

[Brother Cracker]

[SeekAndFind]

[wrench]

I see the problem, the Pringles can fell off the antenna.

[dfwgator]