North Korean internet suffers more outages:DPRK blames U.S. for December 22 internet blackout

http://www.nknews.org/

North Korea’s internet suffered more outages on December 27 and 28, with in country reporters from Chinese media outlet Xinhua also claiming that 3G services had been affected.

The most recent internet blackout occurred yesterday at 1pm local time in Pyongyang, which followed a larger outage on Saturday 27.

“At Pyongyang time 7:30 p.m. Saturday, DPRK’s Internet and 3G mobile network came to a standstill, and had not returned to normal at press time as of 9:30 p.m. Saturday, according to Xinhua reporters and Chinese facilities based in the country,” Xinhua reported.

Though it is difficult to establish if the outages are caused by a cyber-attack, experts believe that North Korea’s connection problems are likely the result of private hacking groups running denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the DPRK’s limited internet capabilities.

Denial of service attacks involve overwhelming a server with more traffic than it can handle, and are different from the attack carried out on Sony last month.

“A DDoS attack is quite straightforward, doesn’t require much technical knowledge to carry out, and appeals to the “younger generation” which fashion themselves as hackers,” Frank Feinstein, NK Newschief technical officer said.

“It’s nothing compared to Sony – this is like firing a warning shot at a country in response to them nuking you,” Feinstein added.

While attribution of such attacks is difficult, two hacking groups claimed responsibility for knocking North Korea offline on December 22.

“Lizard squad”, a group which has a history of attacking Sony and Xbox gaming services, tweeted that “Xbox Live & other targets have way more capacity. North Korea is a piece of cake,” while a further group also sent tweets claiming responsibility for both attacks: