"Recent North Korean Internet Outages Caused by DDoS Attacks," Says US Firm

An analysis has emerged suggesting that the recent internet access disruptions in North Korea were caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

According to Reuters on the 23rd local time, the U.S. network monitoring firm Kentik stated that abnormal, large-scale traffic was detected multiple times on North Korea's internet network for about 32 hours starting from the 20th.

Kentik explained that the timing of the disruptions in accessing North Korean websites coincided with a sharp surge in traffic directed toward North Korea from countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, and Venezuela.

Kentik's director of internet analysis said, "All of this traffic started at the exact same time," adding, "It is clearly a DDoS attack."

According to a Kentik official, abnormal traffic surged sharply starting at around 11:00 a.m. on the 20th.

However, Kentik stated that the perpetrators of the attack have not been identified.

In addition, the data analyzed by Kentik represents only a portion of the total traffic directed toward North Korea.

Since the 20th, intermittent access failures have occurred in North Korea across some 40 state-run websites using the ".kp" national 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 outages.

However, according to Kentik's analysis, a DDoS attack—in which a massive volume of traffic is simultaneously sent from outside to paralyze servers—may be the cause of this disruption.

This is not the first time North Korea's internet network has experienced large-scale outages.

In late 2014, North Korea's entire internet network was paralyzed for several hours following controversies surrounding the Sony Pictures film "The Interview," which depicted the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

(Photo: Screenshot of the Korean Central News Agency website access screen, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.