NK websites back after 10-hour gap
Print Edition
KEY North Korean websites were back online yesterday after a shutdown lasting almost 10 hours that followed a US vow to respond to a cyberattack on Sony Pictures that Washington blames on Pyongyang.
It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the Internet stoppage in one of the least-wired countries in the world, but outside experts said it could be anything from a cyberattack to a simple power failure. The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the US government was responsible.
Even if a cyberattack had caused the shutdown, analysts said, it would largely be symbolic since only a tiny number of North Koreans are allowed on the Internet — a fraction of Pyongyang’s staunchly loyal elite, as well as foreigners.
Though it denies responsibility for the Sony hack, North Korea’s government had called it a “righteous deed” and made clear its anger at Sony’s “The Interview,” a comedy that depicts the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
South Korean officials said the Korean Central News Agency and the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, which are the main channels for official North Korean news, had both gone down.
But both websites were back up yesterday.
Among the posts glorifying the ruling Kim family included one about Kim Jong Un visiting a catfish farm.
US computer experts described the Internet outage as sweeping and progressively worse.
Jim Cowie, chief scientist at Dyn Research, an Internet performance company, said in an online post that North Korea came back online after an outage that lasted more than nine hours.
Possible causes for the shutdown include an external attack on its fragile network or even just power problems, Cowie wrote.
But he added: “We can only guess.”
The outage was probably more inconvenient to foreigners, who can access the Internet through 3G networks, than to North Korean residents, most of whom have never gone online.
There are only about 1,000 IP addresses in North Korea for a population of 25 million, according to South Korean analysts.
The privileged are also allowed to view a self-contained domestic Intranet that carries state media propaganda and a limited amount of information.
North Korea did not immediately respond to the shutdown. But a commentary in state media criticized what it called a failed US policy on Pyongyang and comparing the United States to the Roman Empire, which, it said, “was thrown into a dumping ground of history as it collapsed while seeking prosperity through aggression and war.”
Last year, North Korea suffered similar brief Internet shutdowns of websites at a time of nuclear tensions with the US, South Korea and other countries.
North Korea blamed Seoul and Washington for the outages.
President Barack Obama has said the US government expects to respond to the Sony hack, which he described as an expensive act of “cyber vandalism” by North Korea.
Obama did not discuss details, and it was not immediately clear whether the Internet connectivity problems represented the retribution.
The US government regards its offensive cyber operations as highly classified.
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