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The CBC says that North Korea suffers internet outages in wake of Sony hacking attack
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.
Actually, Sony could have paid a couple of guys in a basement in Romania to take down North Korea, given how centralized and limited their system is, but the US is going to hint at doing it, whether they did [probable] or not.
The State Department quote is a nice psych-out:
“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.
4 comments
Well dayum! They coulda called me! I woulda done it cheap like! Only $200k! Bargain basement to take out a Country (even if it’s only NK, still a Country!) Heck… I woulda tossed in a bonus and redirected anyone who visited a US Gov site to Sony!
Hmmph!
(BTW. The State Dep’t is full of *you know what*! They are just making sure people will assume they did it to give them cred! None of the ‘3-letter acronym’ agencies could hack their own servers, let alone another Countries!)
It was probably a hacker fan who wanted to see the movie. There are enough botnets available that it doesn’t take much to generate a DDOS these days, and NK doesn’t have the technology to shake them off.
The guys who do DRM for Sony could certainly pull it off if the price was right, because NK is definitely a soft target.
North Korea’s Internet link to the world is a single T1 line to China. There are perhaps 1000 people in all of North Korea who have access to the actual Internet. There is a sort of pseudo-Internet inside North Korea that has selected content manually copy-and-pasted from the “real” Internet as well as locally generated content and that pseudo-Internet was utterly unaffected by this hack. In other words, you could down North Korea’s T1 by sneezing on it, and for the most part nobody in North Korea would notice. Maybe Dear Leader would notice when he couldn’t surf porn after dinner, but nobody else would.
One thousand might be high given the paranoia in North Korea. China might have cut them off for non-payment of anything. The Chinese have to be getting tired of supporting them. They are certainly more trouble than they are worth to anyone.