▲ A screen capture of an access outage on the website of North Korea's Korean Central News Agency on the 20th
An analysis has emerged suggesting that the recent internet access outages in North Korea were caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
According to Reuters on the 23rd (local time), U.S. network monitoring firm Kentik stated that multiple instances of abnormal, large-scale traffic were detected on North Korea's internet network for about 32 hours starting from the 20th.
Kentik explained that the timing of the outages on North Korean websites coincided with a surge in traffic directed toward North Korea from countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, and Venezuela.
"All of this traffic started at the exact same time," said Kentik's director of internet analysis. "It is clearly a DDoS attack."
According to a Kentik official, the abnormal traffic surged starting from around 11:00 AM on the 20th.
However, Kentik stated that the identity of the attacker has not been confirmed.
In addition, the data analyzed by Kentik represents only a fraction of the total traffic heading toward North Korea.
Starting from the 20th, intermittent access failures occurred in about 40 official North Korean websites using the .kp country code domain, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Korean Central News Agency.
In response, some had raised the possibility that North Korea's unstable power supply or communication line issues could be the cause of the disruptions.
However, according to Kentik's analysis, a DDoS attack—where servers are paralyzed by flooding them with massive amounts of traffic from outside sources simultaneously—may be the cause of this disruption.
This is not the first time North Korea's internet network has suffered large-scale outages.
In late 2014, North Korea's entire internet network was paralyzed for several hours following a controversy surrounding the Sony Pictures film "The Interview," which centered on the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
(Photo: Capture of the Korean Central News Agency website access screen, Yonhap News)
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