Shalom & Happy Chanukah,
It looks like we have responded to the attack by Korea although a war has not been declared. I expected this response because I know it is entirely possible for Americas and Europes computer resources to inundate North Koreas to the point of knocking them entirely off the Internet.
By using conventional cyberwar methods such as the DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks it seems that since late last Friday North Korea has been choked off the world Internet by shutting down their primary routers. This is a technique that any computer scientist has known about for ages and it remains a threat to our own communication systems. But it seems that through clever use of remote bots (code which waits for commands and then flood an IP location with packets) that the first salvo has been successful in bringing their systems down.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2014/12/22/north-korea-experiencing-widespread-internet-outages/zBoRmX74Ucpr4HjLXYTceI/story.html
North Korea’s link to Internet goes darkWASHINGTON — North Korea’s already tenuous links to the Internet went completely dark Monday after days of instability, in what Internet monitors described as one of the worst North Korean network failures in years.
The loss of service came just days after President Barack Obama pledged that the United States would launch a “proportional response” to the recent attacks on Sony Pictures, which government officials have linked to North Korea.
Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, an Internet performance management company, said that North Korean Internet access first became unstable late Friday. The situation worsened over the weekend, and by Monday, North Korea’s Internet was completely offline.
“Their networks are under duress,” Madory said. “This is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers,” he said, referring to a distributed denial of service attack, in which attackers flood a network with traffic until it collapses under the load.
North Korea does very little commercial or government business over the Internet. The country officially has 1,024 Internet protocol addresses, although the actual number may be somewhat higher. By comparison, the United States has billions of addresses.
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North Korea’s addresses are managed by Star Joint Venture, the state-run Internet provider, which routes many of those connections through China Unicom, China’s state-owned telecommunications company.
CloudFlare, an Internet company based in San Francisco, confirmed Monday that North Korea’s Internet access was “toast.” A large number of connections had been withdrawn, “showing that the North Korean network has gone away,” Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s founder, wrote in an email.
Although the failure might have been caused by maintenance problems, Madory and others said that such problems most likely would not have caused such a prolonged, widespread loss.
The failure follows requests by the Obama administration to China seeking its help in blocking North Korea’s ability to wage cyberattacks, an early step toward the “proportional response” that Obama promised as retribution for North Korea’s suspected involvement in the cyberattack on Sony Pictures, as well as a broader warning to others who may try similar attacks on U.S. targets in the future, senior administration officials have said.
The outage is not likely to affect the vast majority of North Koreans, who have no access to the Internet. The biggest impact would be felt by the country’s elite, state-run media channels and propagandists, as well as North Korea’s cadre of cyberwarriors.
Topic: CYBER-WAR has begun (Read 663 times)