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| A South Korean army soldier watches a TV news program showing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Dec. 22, 2014. North Korea hates the Hollywood film that revolves around the assassination of its beloved leader, but the country has had a long love affair with cinema - of its own particular styling. |
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. But the country has for months
condemned the "The Interview," a Sony satirical comedy about a plot to
assassinate the North Korean leader. Sony canceled plans to release the
movie after a group of hackers made terroristic threats against theaters
that planned to show it.
North Korean diplomat Kim Song, asked Monday about the Internet attack, told The Associated Press: "I have no information."
Ivan
Simonovic, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for human rights, told
reporters he didn't want to speculate about the nature of the Internet
outages but said he hoped it would be "thoroughly investigated."
Doug
Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, an Internet
performance company, said Monday the problems began over the weekend and
grew progressively worse to the point that "North Korea's totally
down."
North Korea is one of the least
connected countries in the world. Few North Koreans have access to
computers, and even those who do are typically able to connect only to a
domestic intranet. Though North Korea is equipped for broadband
Internet, only a small, approved segment of the population has any
access to the World Wide Web. More than a million people, however, are
now using mobile phones in North Korea. The network covers most major
cities but users cannot call outside the country or receive calls from
outside.
With the current outages, Madory said, "They have left the global Internet and they are gone until they come back."
Another
Internet technology service, Arbor Networks, which protects companies
against hacker attacks, said its monitoring detected denial-of-service
attacks aimed at North Korea's infrastructure starting Saturday and
persisting Monday. Such attacks transmit so much spurious data traffic
to Internet equipment that it becomes overwhelmed, until the attacks
stop or the spurious traffic can be filtered and discarded to allow
normal connections to resume.
Given North
Korea's limited connectivity and lack of Internet sophistication, it
would be relatively simple for a band of hacktivists to shut down online
access, and it should not be assumed that the U.S. government had any
part, said Dan Holden, director of security research at Arbor Networks.
"Anyone
of us that was upset because we couldn't watch the movie, you could do
that. Their Internet is just not that sophisticated," Holden said.
Madory
said one benign explanation for the problem might be that a router
suffered a software glitch, though a cyber-attack involving North
Korea's Internet service was also a possibility. Routing instabilities
are not uncommon, but instead of getting better, as one might expect,
"it's getting worse, getting progressively degraded," Madory said.
"This
doesn't fit that profile," of an ordinary routing problem, he said.
"This shows something getting progressively worse over time."
