Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses
By NICOLE PERLROTH and DAVID E. SANGER
NY Times
DEC. 22, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/world/asia/attack-is-suspected-as-north-korean-internet-collapses.html
SAN FRANCISCO — North Korea’s already tenuous links to the Internet went
completely dark on 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 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. While an attack on North Korea’s networks was suspected,
there was no definitive evidence of it.
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,” Mr. 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,
though the actual number may be somewhat higher. By comparison, the
United States has billions of addresses.
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.
By Monday morning, those addresses had gone dark for over an hour.
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connections had been withdrawn, “showing that the North Korean network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, Mr.
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 Mr. Obama
promised, as well as a broader warning to others who may try similar
attacks on American targets in the future, senior administration
officials have said.
The loss of service 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 its
propagandists, as well as its cadre of cyberwarriors.
If the attack was American in origin — something the United States would
probably never acknowledge — it would be a rare effort by the United
States to attack a nation’s Internet connections. Until now, most
operations by the United States have amounted to cyberespionage, mostly
to collect defense information or the communications of terrorism suspects.
During the Iraq war, there were periodic efforts to send fake messages
to cellphones or computers to lure Qaeda suspects or other adversaries
into traps. “Olympic Games,” the cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear
enrichment facility, was an extremely rare and sophisticated destructive
attack, intended to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapons
capability.
But a denial-of-service attack is more like cybervandalism, the term
that Mr. Obama used to describe North Korea’s action against Sony. It is
temporary, and while it imposes some costs, it would be limited in the
case of North Korea because of the scarce availability of Internet
services in the country.
Security experts cautioned that the origins of such a failure could be
many. North Korea could be preemptively taking its systems offline to
prepare for an attack, or the loss of service could be the result of an
attack by vigilante hackers, though hacking collectives, such as
Anonymous, had not taken credit for the failure.
Chris Nicholson, a spokesman for Akamai, an Internet content delivery
company, said it was difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of the
failure, given that the company typically sees only a trickle of
Internet connectivity from North Korea.
“All we know for sure is that their networks are under duress,” Mr.
Madory said. “And we have not seen this kind of outage there before.”
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George Antunes Voice (713) 743-3923
Associate Professor Fax (713) 743-3927
Political Science Mail: antunes at uh dot edu
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-3011
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