The country experienced sweeping Internet outages recently – actually, the computer experts described it as the country’s online access going “totally down”. In the meantime, the United States declined to say whether they were responsible amid tensions over the massive hacking of Sony and cancellation of the controversial movie The Interview.


Although North Korea appeared to be back online, the experts admit that it may return to the unstable fluctuations seen before the outage. Security experts at the same time confirm that their monitoring detected DDoS attacks aimed at the country’s infrastructure, which tie up a target’s Internet equipment. As a result, the latter remains overwhelmed until the attacks stop or the traffic is filtered and discarded.

Taking into consideration the limited connectivity and lack of online sophistication of the target, one may say that hackers could easily shut down its online access, and it should not necessarily be the US government. However, Barack Obama said in public that the American government expected to respond to the hacking of Sony Pictures, but didn’t specify how exactly.

It is known that North Korea remains one of the least connected countries worldwide. Not many people there have access to computers, and even they are normally allowed to connect only to a censored domestic version of the web, which has no links to the outside world. In other words, only a small segment of the population is able to access the real Internet via broadband.

As for the outage, the local experts believe that one benign explanation for the problem may be that a router suffered a software glitch. At the same time, a cyber-attack involving the country’s Internet service was also possible.