North Korea’s Internet Restored Following ‘Unprecedented’ Takedown

On Monday, North Korea’s Internet was taken offline. The country suffered a complete Internet outage that lasted around nine hours before it was restored on Tuesday. However, the cause for the outage has yet to be determined.

According to Dyn, a company based in the U.S. that monitors Internet infrastructure, the reason for the Internet outage in North Korea could range from technological glitches to hacking attacks. The company said that the country’s internet links, which pass through China, were unstable on Monday and then went completely offline

"I haven't seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in [North Korea] before," said Dyn director of internet analysis Doug Madory to NorthKoreaTech.org. "Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn't be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently."

It is still unclear as to what caused the outage though one theory is that North Korea suffered a massive DDoS attack. Other theories being suggested is that it could have been a hardware failure, North Korea taking itself offline, or a cyberattack of some sort. 

The Internet outage came after the FBI condemned the recent attack on Sony, which resulted in a massive data breach, and stated that North Korea was responsible. On Friday, the Obama administration weighed in on the attack stating that this was an act of cyber-vandalism, not of war, and said, “We will respond proportionately.” 

In the meantime, U.S. officials continue to say that Washington was in no way involved with the recent Internet outage in North Korea. Meanwhile, North Korea continues to deny that it was responsible or involved in the attack on Sony that resulted in the exposure of social security numbers, release of sensitive material, and threats against Sony employees.