North Korea experiencing severe Internet outages

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By ERIC TUCKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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.

President Barack Obama said Friday the U.S. government expected to respond to the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., which he described as an expensive act of "cyber vandalism" that he blamed on North Korea. Obama did not say how the U.S. might respond, and it was not immediately clear if the Internet connectivity problems represented the retribution. The U.S. government regards its offensive cyber operations as highly classified.

"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.

North Korea has forcefully denied it was responsible for hacking into Sony.

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20141222/us-sony-hack-north-korea-outage-6ca1e97057.html

---

The backbone in North Korea must run on Sony equipment.

[Feral Child]

1. Well, how surprisng! n/t

[Voice for Peace]

2. Anonymous?

Didn't they just announce a new operation Hack North Korea?

[L0oniX]

3. 175.45.176.0 to 175.45.179.255 & 210.52.109.0 to 210.52.109.255 ...feel free to DOS them...

...and the US gov may hire you.

[onehandle]

4. Good. Make it permanent, CIA. nt

[irisblue]

5. wah wah wah awh

don't start a cyberwar, Mind You, that clown Bush goaded them for years and years .

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

12. I don't think DPRK can play without an internet!

[Stellar]

6. hmmm...can that be?

[GreatGazoo]

7. it's all fun and games until ...

South Korea’s nuclear operator has been targeted in a cyber-attack, with hackers threatening people to “stay away” from three of the country’s nuclear reactors should they not cease operations by Christmas. The stolen data is thought to be non-critical information, and both the company and state officials have today assured that the attacked facilities and South Korea’s 23 atomic reactors are safe.

"It's our judgment that the control system itself is designed in such a way and there is no risk whatsoever," explained Chung Yang-ho, South Korea’s deputy energy minister.

"It is 100 percent impossible that a hacker can stop nuclear power plants by attacking them because the control monitoring system is totally independent and closed," added an official from Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co (KHNP).

However, KHNP has said that it will be conducting a series of security drills over the next two days at four power plants to ensure they can all withstand a cyber-attack.

http://thestack.com/south-korean-power-plants-cyber-attack-drills-hack-221214

[DustyJoe]

8. Nork threats

The norks threatened the white house over the weekend

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_NKOREA_SONY_HACKING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-12-21-21-44-06

If kim can't get his porn will he be fueling up one of his missiles he test fired towards Hawaii last year ?

The threats after this outage will probably be louder than the weekend threats against the White House and Pentagon.

[irisblue]

14. really? messing with the white house?

Obamas' shoe meet cockroach....

[cosmicone]

9. Take the matches away from the child .. bravo Pres. Obama n/t

[treestar]

10. They deny doing it yet they benefit from it

They prevented release of the movie, so was that just a coincidence? Someone else did the hacking and gave them the information.

Then again it is hard to believe they have anyone with the skill to do the hacking.

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

11. Not necessarily US dirty work

There are some very good hackers all across the planet, and DPRK makes a very satisfying target.

Otherwise,

[titaniumsalute]

13. How will Dictator Jammy Pants wank off to Dennis Rodman videos now?

[DeSwiss]

15. The Great School Yard Bully Strikes Again!!! YAY!!!

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

16. Seriously?

You despise the US so much that in some sort of brawl between the US and North freaking Korea of all places, you still take North Korea's side and call the US a bully? (if it even was the US, and not Anonymous or some other random group of hackers.) I thought your crush on Putin was bad enough. Which other murdering ruthless dictators are you loving on these days?

[Ykcutnek]

23. People like that are a laughing stock in American politics.

Let them vent. They'll never gain enough influence to inflict the damage their batshit crazy would cause.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

31. Well, good Gods,

I criticize the US up one side and down the other, and our military interventionism has been a dismal failure for as long as we've engaged in it, but even I am not going to take Kim Jong Un's side on any fight.

I'm beginning to wonder how many people a freebie account can put on ignore. I think I'm up to 10 or 11 now, and the influence on my blood pressure has been great since I set that double handful of trolls to 'vanish' mode. On the other hand, I think it would work far better if the 'ignore' didn't simply lop off all of the replies to those ignored by other people. I'm sure I'm missing some actual worthwhile comments that are posted in response to ones that aren't worth reading. Just treat the 'ignored' like 'name removed' comments, and let us see every other comment, even replies to 'ignored'.

[Throd]

37. Hannah?

[Brother Buzz]

43. That name rings a bell

[LiberalElite]

41. This is the way NK looks EVERY NIGHT nt

[riversedge]

17. informative graph in this article about the NK outage:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/22/north-korea-internet_n_6367654.html


...Here's a graph, created by Madory on Monday, showing the unstable networks in North Korea over the past few days:

[riversedge]

18. BTW--I like the WH smerky response in the OP--nothing

like it from HP article

[24601]

19. Nice country youse guys have over there. It would be a shame if it just....broke.

No soup for you - two years!

[christx30]

20. The Comcast tech has been called. He'll be out there

between 8am and 11pm on Saturday the 3rd. Make sure there is someone over the age of 18 with enough energy to answer the phone so the tech knows you're there (designate one person, and give him/her a Pop-Tart the morning of the appointment).

[sarge43]

22. And the Snark-o-lious Award goes to

[24601]

25. Pop-tarts? If we wuz ritzy enough for pop-tarts, why wud we have COMCAST? n/t

[arely staircase]

21. how many had service to begin with?

I bet more people have access in Afghanistan.

[underpants]

26. or Cuba

I can't imagine many people had access but I would guess this is targeted at the government/military usage

BTW- opening up the internet is one of the major parts of the re-establishment of relations with Cuba.

[Renew Deal]

33. World Bank say NK has 0 Internet users

Cuba is 25% which is respectable.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2

[Ykcutnek]

24. I wish they'd take it a step farther and target those who have a sad for North Korea.

Let them sit in their basements without connectivity, in solidarity with the brutal regime they support so much.

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

27. If I had to guess a country, I'd go with Japan.

[Ryan Fitzomething]

28. The Heart Bleeds

[defacto7]

29. The word now is that their Internet is totally down.

No one can really know what that means but that can only happen with the help of China where NK's main Internet connections reside. But it could mean that it's not actually "totally down" but inaccessible to most of the West where the US could have influence over the operation of the main Internet nodes. The Internet is pretty resilient in general so if it is fully down... it has to be China permitting it.

[NorthCarolina]

30. I thought NK had NO internet service to begin with. I guess I misunderstood,

but a guest on the Daily Show in this past week mentioned that North Korea had no internet service, and that their people were generally unaware that such a thing even existed. I must have heard that wrong I guess.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

32. The people don't get internet.

Heck, most of the elites don't get internet.

But there are no doubt a few closely monitored places where outside connectivity is essential and allowed, which means hackers don't have to go far to cause massive problems. The country has already bottlenecked itself to limit the targets hackers need to hit.

The way some talking head types talked about it, though, you'd think their computer trainees didn't even understand the concept of networking, which is ridiculous. They didn't just magically pop out internet attacks. Some group there understands networking just fine, they just mostly get to train 'in-country', with a big old firewall blocking them from getting out to everywhere outside the country until Supreme Leader decides he needs them to hit a target somewhere. I'm sure they've got plenty of networking hardware to train on, even if a lot of it was smuggled in by people willing to sell such to North Korea's government in violation of user licensing agreements.

[herding cats]

38. The elite have access to a intranet

Which is limited network which only allows government approved websites.

If you went to North Korea and asked people about the internet, most of them would probably have no idea what you were talking about. Most of the country is still mired in poverty, much of it rural. In Pyongyang, though, the privileged capital city, and perhaps in one or two other cities, North Koreans with good office jobs or coveted university slots might assume that you were talking about Kwangmyong.

Kwangmyong, which is Korean for "bright star," is North Korea's officially sanctioned intranet. It is a closed network that runs on pirated Japanese versions of Microsoft software and looks sort of like the real internet but isn't. Rather, it runs rudimentary email and browser tools that are restricted to a hand-picked collection of "sites" that have been copied over and censored from the real internet.

This network is accessible by the handful of computer labs at major North Korean government offices, universities, and a small number of cyber cafes in major cities. (Internal travel is forbidden without permission in North Korea, so most citizens never see Pyongyang or can visit its cyber cafes.) But you need a computer to access it, and that's only possible with official permission. Outside computers are illegal (except for the very highest elite, for whom many official rules do not apply); the only acceptable computers are produced by Morning Panda, a government-run company that makes only a few thousand computers every year.

http://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7435625/north-korea-internet

Some very elite have access to the WWW which which some are tasked with searching for any mention of South Korea, etc. Lil'Kim I would imagine has access to whatever he'd like to view.

[ohnoyoudidnt]

34. Kim Jong Un is pissed

[Aristus]

35. You like that, DPRK?

You fuck with the bull, you get the horns!...

[PSPS]

36. Yes, collective punishment always works so well. Just ask Israel.

It saddens me to see how well the media has sold the line of "USA vs DPRK SMACKDOWN" over this now-somewhat-ordinary network intrusion.

OMG! A movie's release has been jeopardized/postponed! Rich movie stars are embarrassed!!1 RED ALERT! NATIONAL SECURITY! 9/11!!1!

I guess the next logical demand would be, "NUKE 'EM!!11!!"

[Downwinder]

39. Moving 100 TB of data?

[LiberalElite]

40. how can they tell? :P nt

[Bosonic]

42. Have they tried turning it off then turning it back on?

[Kennah]

46. It's all fun and games until Jen drops the fucking Internet

[Kennah]

44. Thank you for call Comcast. For English, Press One. Para Español, Marque Número Dos.

[Throd]

45. Maybe someone was using the microwave oven during internet hour.

No microwave between 8 and 9 pm!