A significant cyber attack has likely led to internet disruptions in North Korea, blocking access to several state-run websites in the isolated nation this week, according to an analysis by the American network monitoring company Kentik.
Traffic data indicated that North Korea’s internet experienced surges from countries like Vietnam and Venezuela at the same time multiple North Korean websites faced interruptions over a 32-hour period, starting Tuesday, as reported by Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik.
“All this traffic started simultaneously and is coming from Vietnam and Venezuela. It is certainly a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack,” Madory stated.
Kentik’s data revealed that the traffic spikes began around 11:00 AM local time on Tuesday. However, the data does not identify the attackers, and Kentik has only analyzed a portion of the traffic directed at North Korea, Madory noted.
The disruptions affected over 40 official websites utilizing the country’s .kp domain, including those of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the state news agency KCNA, according to South Korean reports.
South Korean media also cited security experts suggesting that an unstable power supply in North Korea could have contributed to the outages.
The internet service drops in North Korea do not appear to be related to global internet issues caused by recently revealed vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language, which occurred later in the week.
North Korea’s heavily controlled internet has faced outages in the past. In late 2014, following controversies surrounding a Sony Pictures comedy about the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the country suffered a complete internet outage lasting several hours.
