North Korea’s weak Internet links appear to have been crippled by a major outage, cyber experts said Monday, suggesting the country’s network could be under attack after the hacking of Sony Pictures.
Pyongyang’s apparent connection woes came after US President Barack Obama vowed to retaliate for the cyber assault on the Hollywood studio blamed by the FBI on the isolated Asian nation.
While US officials refused to confirm whether Washington had already taken any action against Pyongyang, they did call for compensation for Sony which — following threats against movie-goers — pulled the Christmas Day debut of the comedy action film “The Interview,” which lampoons North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
“If they want to help here they could admit their culpability and compensate Sony for the damages that they caused,” State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters.
According to respected US-based cyber security firm Dyn Research, Internet connectivity between North Korea and the outside world, never good at the best of times, seems to have been severely affected over the weekend.
“I haven’t seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP (North Korea) before,” Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, told the North Korea Tech website.
“Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently.”
North Korea’s communist authorities however have denied being behind the Sony hacking that also led to the release of a slew of embarrassing company emails.
Instead Pyongyang has called for a joint investigation, and vowed reprisals if the US brings in new sanctions, including putting the country back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The diplomatic row comes as China failed on Monday to block the first-ever UN Security Council meeting on North Korea’s dismal rights record after a strong majority of members voted in favor of it.
North Korea has limited Internet access, available only to trusted government officials.
– Networks under duress –
Its main Internet presence is through its Uriminzokkiri website, which has Twitter and Flickr feeds and is best known for posting propaganda videos excoriating South Korea and the United States.
On Monday the website was slow to load, and then eventually just timed out.
A graph by Dyn appeared to show that from around 2200 GMT Sunday to 1000 GMT Monday the number of unstable networks seen in North Korea dramatically increased.
“Their networks are under duress,” Madory told the New York Times.
“This is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers,” he said, a reference to a “distributed denial of service” attack in which attackers flood a network until it collapses under the strain.
Obama had vowed a “proportional” response, saying he saw the attack as an act of “cyber vandalism” not a declaration of war.
But US officials have been tight-lipped about exactly what action they will take, and Harf refused to confirm reports that North Korea’s cyberspace was under attack.