North Korea sees big Internet outage after cyber attack

North Korea gets a taste of its own medicine, but it isn't yet clear if this is the work of the U.S.

The strange saga that has been playing out between the United States and North Korea over the last couple of weeks just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

The story, which has already seen a major U.S. movie studio get hacked, followed by the abrupt cancellation of a planned movie release and, strangest of all, a call for a joint investigation into the hackings between the United States and North Korea, took yet another twist, as the country is now experiencing as-yet unexplained mass Internet outages.

Reports of the outages first came from Dyn Research, a company that monitors Internet performance. It posted its findings via Twitter earlier Monday:

After 24hrs of increasing instability, North Korean national Internet has been down hard for more than 2hrs pic.twitter.com/hDbitXBoqp

— Dyn Research (@DynResearch) December 22, 2014

As you can see in the above graph, the number of available networks in North Korea suddenly drops to zero around 5 PM local time.

Interestingly, it seems as though this nowhere near the first cyber attack that North Korea has suffered in the past week. According to data supplied to Vator from Arbor Networks, a threat discovery and assessment company, there have been a number of attacks that have occurred since Thursday of last week, December 18th. 

"Now obviously given recent events with Sony, this sort of report is far more fascinating than it normally would be. The first question when you see this type of report is whether it’s purely a connectivity issue or whether an attack is behind it,"  Dan Holden, Director of ASERT for Arbor Networks, wrote in a blog post.

"While visibility into North Korean Internet is quite difficult, we are able to see quite a few attacks over the last few days."

There were no attacks from December 15th through the 17th, the company said, but since then the peak size attack, in terms of bps, occurred on December 20th. The longest attack, Arbor Networks, said did occur on Monday, though, and may still be ongoing.

 In fact, the company said that "not all of the attacks on December 21st and 22nd may be in yet," as it can take 24 hours for the data to make it to over.

Given what has been going on between our two countries recently, everyone is obviously going to be asking the same question: is the United States behind this? After all, President Obama did vow last week that the United States would respond to the cyber attack, which he blamed on North Korea, "in a place and time and manner that we choose," and had said that the country would "respond proportionally" to the attack.

Numerous major media outlets have been reaching out to the White House, which has so far not offered any comment. But not everyone is convinced that the U.S. government is behind this latest attack.

"The 'who done it' is great fun, especially when it involves North Korea, given the events of last week. The real answer is that it would be easier to say who is NOT doing this," Holden wrote.

:I’m quite sure that this is not the work of the U.S. government. Much like a real world strike from the U.S., you probably wouldn’t know about it until it was too late. This is not the modus operandi of any government work."

Whether or not this is an official response from the United States or not, it seems likely that it has something to do with the larger issues at hand. And who knows if North Korea will simply blame us anyway; this is not the most stable country in the world, after all. 

Either way, we should all expect a response of some kind from North Korea at some point, and a continued escalation of this cyber war. Thanks a lot, Seth Rogen.

(Image source: huffingtonpost.com)