North Korea Internet Service Restored After Over Nine-Hour Outage

The disruption came amid an escalating
war of words between the United States
and North Korea over a massive
cyberattack on Sony Pictures.
Though there has been no comment from
the authorities in Pyongyang, US
experts reported the restoration.
Some analysts say the country’s web
access was cut entirely for a time.
Washington said that it would launch a
proportional response to a cyber-
attack on Sony Pictures, which made a
comedy about North Korean leader, Kim
Jong-un but U.S. officials said
Washington was not involved.
Officials would not comment on any US
involvement in the current outages.
CEO of U.S.-based CloudFlare which
protects websites from web-based
attacks, Matthew Prince, said the fact
that North Korea’s Internet was back
up “is pretty good evidence that the
outage wasn’t caused by a state-
sponsored attack, otherwise it’d likely
still be down for the count”.
Almost all of North Korea’s Internet
links and traffic pass through China
and it dismissed any suggestion that it
was involved as “irresponsible”.
U.S. President, Barack Obama, told CNN
on Sunday that the hack was “an act of
cyber vandalism that was very costly,
very expensive” but that he didn’t
consider it an act of war.
He had previously said that the United
States would “respond proportionally”
to the attack on Sony, without giving
specifics.
The outage brought down sites run by
the Korean Central News Agency and the
Rodong Sinmun — major mouthpieces for
the regime — according to the South
Korean news agency, Yonhap.
Meanwhile, South Korea, which remains
technically at war with the North, said
it could not rule out the involvement of
its isolated neighbour in a cyberattack
on its nuclear power plant operator. It
said that only non-critical data was
stolen and operations were not at risk,
but had asked for U.S. help in
investigating.
China’s permanent representative to the
United Nations has called for all sides
to avoid an escalation of tension on the
Korean Peninsula after the UN security
council put the North’s human rights
record on its agenda.
The United States asked China to
identify any North Korean hackers
operating in China and, if found, send
them back to North Korea. It wants
China to send a strong message to
Pyongyang that such acts would not be
tolerated, the officials said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said on
Monday it opposed all forms of
cyberattacks but there was no proof
that North Korea was responsible for
the Sony hacking.
North Korea has denied it was behind
the cyberattack on Sony and has vowed
to hit back against any U.S. retaliation,
threatening the White House and the
Pentagon.
The hackers said they were incensed by
a Sony comedy about a fictional
assassination of North Korean leader,
Kim Jong Un, which the movie studio has
now pulled from general release.
China is North Korea’s only major ally
and would be central to any U.S. efforts
to crack down on the isolated state. But
the United States has also accused
China of cyber spying in the past and a
U.S. official has said that the attack on
Sony could have used Chinese servers to
mask its origin.