Opinion: Why the US isn't behind the North Korean Internet outage

CS Monitor ^ | 12/24/2014 | Jason Healey, Passcode columnist

[SeekAndFind]

North Korea has a fragile Internet, with a risk of being disconnected from the Web for any number of minor sneezes. But an attack of this nature can be easily attributed to the US and the administration should be up front about it.

It's unlikely the US government was behind the recent disruption of the North Korean Internet.

First, this kind of "you-slap-me-I-slap-you" response is not the US style. Instead, the Americans are more likely to come up with some epic, uber-technological hack that cleverly inverts the North Koreans internal systems, such as Stuxnet did to the Iranians.

What's more, the US fully supports cross-border flow of information as fundamental under Article 19 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, violates that, limiting people's access to the Internet. Even though the North Koreans have only limited connectivity for the elite, the White House and Department of State would not give up this principle lightly.

[MrB]

The current leadership simply lacks the will to counterattack real enemies of America...

mostly because they share the same goal.

[Ocoeeman]

Sure Nancy when you demand the same from Charlie Rangel.

[Ocoeeman]

Sorry folks this got posted to the wrong thread. Fat finger syndrome.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

My top choices are Sony getting revenge or just hacked off hackers who love responding to a dare. Nothing patriotic about their motivations.

[Yo-Yo]

So North Korea have hackers sophisticated enough to hack Sony’s servers and download terabytes of emails, yet their internet is so backwards that they only have 1024 IP addresses and get their internet service from China through dial-up?

Which is it?

[TruthShallSetYouFree]

A good pair of scissors could destroy North Korea's communications network.

[FreeInWV]

The forward facing ip range was published. I expect it was a bunch of script kiddies in their parents basement using one of these.

[Joe Boucher]

to stand at the 38th parallel and look in to North Korea is nervous time.
Brainwashed doesn’t begin to tell the story.

[PATRIOT1876]

The North Korean Internet only has about a thousand users. Great Scot, I bet only 5% of North Koreans have electricity.

It wouldn’t be hard to disrupt an Internet system that has components made mostly of vacuum tubes....

[PATRIOT1876]

7500 TRS-80’s strung together combined with an old Victrola connected to a phone system where “Mabel” has to give 3 rings to reach Chairman Kim Dung sounds easy to topple.

[PATRIOT1876]

“All your base are belong to us, Yankee dog!”

[MasterGunner01]

The NorKs Internet hacking (denial of service) was done by five p.o.’ed teens that wanted to see the movie. So, after Kim Jong-Un got his way and intimidated Sony Corporation, the teens took down Kim's Internet connections to remind him who's boss.

[Chewbarkah]

Theory for analysis:
1. Third party wants to stir up trouble to distract USA, and/or test the waters for future projects.
2. Performs (or contracts for) the SONY hack, with false clues left behind to point at the obvious culprit, NK.
3. Phase II - Screws with NORKS internet, making it look like the obvious culprit, the USA, is doing it as payback.
4. Suspect List: Russkies? Chinese? Muzz? DNC? Independents? So many good friends to choose from. Chinese have the capabilities and probably control over NK internet, and don’t like Japan.