North Korea just had its second internet outage. According to researchers, the incident was started by a cyber strike known as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS). The most recent Internet interruption happened at 6 a.m. Wednesday, the day after North Korea conducted its fifth missile launch this month.
According to Junade Ali, a British cyber security researcher, internet connection to and from North Korea was entirely cut off throughout the attack. Junade Ali is a specialist who analyzes North Korean websites and email servers on a daily basis.
‘When someone attempts to connect to a North Korean IP address, Internet traffic cannot be transmitted into that nation,’ he told Reuters. The email servers were back up and operating within a few hours.
However, official North Korean government websites such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Air Koryo are still sluggish and congested. Within the country, North Korea has restricted Internet access.
It is unknown how many individuals have access to the World Wide Web, although it is expected that just 1% of the 25 million inhabitants will have access. According to North Korean network data and log files, NK Pro, a Seoul-based news website that routinely monitors North Korea, stated its website was inaccessible.
This means that North Korea’s Domain Name System (DNS) has been deactivated, and visitors can no longer access the website. A similar occurrence occurred on January 14, according to NK Pro. According to Junade Ali, the cause for the simultaneous server outages was that the hackers may have used DDoS assaults to damage the network, resulting in abnormally high Internet traffic.
‘It is typical for a server to be down for a short amount of time, but suddenly all websites are down.’ ‘It is not uncommon for the entire country to be cut off from the Internet,’ he stated. What is occurring now is that the main routers have turned off the Internet after the network and each server have been shut down. Junade Ali stated that he believed the cyber-attack was the consequence of a network assault rather than a power loss.