Internet in North Korea is down.

[viper37]

North Korea internet 'totally down' as US cyber attack suspected

North Korea is experiencing one of its worst ever internet outages days after US President Barack Obama vowed a "proportional" response for the hermit country's cyber attack on a Hollywood studio.   It began encountering problems on Friday, and by Monday night North Korea was completely cut off from the world wide web. One expert described its connectivity as "toast."   The US declined to comment on the situation amid speculation that America was hitting back in a new cyber war to protect itself from future hacking assaults.   However, US State Department spokesman Marie Harf said: "As we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen."   Other possible explanations for North Korea's internet woes included China, through which many of its connections are routed, wanting to restrain its ally by limiting its access. It could also be a maintenance problem.

[celedhring]

So all their computers are down? Both of them?

[crazy canuck]

What would be really great is if someone could flood N. Korean internet sites with copies of The Interview.

[Josquius]

The US is doing it?

It strikes me anonymous would be pretty annoyed about NKs big assault on free speech and might seek to do this

[Norgy]

Not only am I surprised that it's down, but now I really want to see what North Korean Internet is like.
Does it have Kim inspecting stuff? What's its attitude to cat videos? What are the most popular memes? It's "I can becomez cheezburger", I bet. And how huge is the amount of underfed midgets doing porn?

[CountDeMoney]

Well shit, it's as if millions of Commodore 64 keyboards suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

[Josephus]

I saw an author interviewed recently either on Colbert or Jon Stewart. She was a teacher in N.Korea teaching "privileged" North Koreans. She wrote a book about her experiences. But she pretty much said that the internet is pretty much non-existent there.

So I imagine that the Internet being down in N.Korea has affected, as Celedhring said, a couple houses.

[celedhring]

To be honest, that probably makes it the best targeted reprisal; since only the upper echelons of the regime will have access to internet, only they are being punished.

[Ideologue]

Sounds good to me. It's unfortunate that the DPRK doesn't have enough stuff to make up for the $150mm+ loss to America, but we had the same problem when we went looking for 100 floor skyscrapers in Afghanistan.

So, following that paradigm, the Internet should be out in the DPRK for thirteen years.

[Admiral Yi]

I saw an author interviewed recently either on Colbert or Jon Stewart. She was a teacher in N.Korea teaching "privileged" North Koreans. She wrote a book about her experiences. But she pretty much said that the internet is pretty much non-existent there.

So I imagine that the Internet being down in N.Korea has affected, as Celedhring said, a couple houses.

I read a review of that book, which is what led me to the belief that NK contracted the job out.

[Martinus]

I saw an author interviewed recently either on Colbert or Jon Stewart. She was a teacher in N.Korea teaching "privileged" North Koreans. She wrote a book about her experiences. But she pretty much said that the internet is pretty much non-existent there.

So I imagine that the Internet being down in N.Korea has affected, as Celedhring said, a couple houses.

Yeah I thought the same (the interview was on Stewart).

[Caliga]

I'm actually surprised anyone in NK had access to the Internet at all other than the Kims themselves.  You'd think they would want total control of the flow of information from every possible medium.

[Siege]

Bring down the internet for x amount of time is not a proportional response.
They need to make public all the emails by the dear leader and his cabal.
Then erase all their 60 gb of data.

[CountDeMoney]

I'm actually surprised anyone in NK had access to the Internet at all other than the Kims themselves.  You'd think they would want total control of the flow of information from every possible medium.

There are only about 1,000 IP addresses in North Korea total  , and they're maintained by China Unicom.  My sympathies for Level 1 tech support, at least for China Unicom, just went up a bit.

North Korea's Internet down; cause unknown
POLITICO
By David Perera
12/22/14 3:52 PM EST

North Korea's tiny piece of the global Internet went dark altogether Monday, after flickering on and off over the last 24 hours, and experts said it could be a cyberattack or a pre-emptive online retreat by Pyongyang. "The North Korean IP space is not reachable from anywhere on Earth right now. It's a national shut down," said Jim Cowie, chief scientist of Dyn Research, which monitors global Internet connectivity.

Shortly after noon ET, "it went out, and did not come back up," he added.

About a day of intermittent connectivity preceded the shutdown, according to Dyn Research and other companies' observations. Almost the entirety of the very small North Korean Internet of approximately a thousand Internet protocol addresses is routed through the Chinese state-owned Internet service provider Chinese Unicom. "That presents a very small attack surface for anybody who wants to take it out," Cowie noted.

But as so often in cybersecurity, the technical evidence is inconclusive as to cause.

Experts say there are four possibilities.

— The North Koreans themselves could have withdrawn their IP space from the wider Internet, as Syria has done in the past. "That, under normal circumstances, would be the best explanation for what we're seeing," said Matthew Prince, CEO of content delivery network provider CloudFlare.

That could be a pre-emptive move to prevent any online attacks, including any U.S. retaliation, from reaching the country.

— China Unicom could have cut North Korea off from the Internet. Technically, that would look no different than if North Korea itself had done so. The U.S. has asked for China's help in blocking North Korea from the Internet.

— The North Korean Internet could be under a denial of service attack. It's impossible to know how much bandwidth flows into North Korea, but it's likely quite small. One indicator that it's an attack is the intermittent, up and down, quality of the North Korean Internet over the past day. Prince said it's "probably risky to speculate that that attack is being launched by any state-based entity.

"If I were speculating, it's equally as likely that it's some plucky 15-year-old in a Guy Fawkes mask."

"Because there is such a minimal amount of activity in and out of North Korea, the level of sophistication you would need to disrupt that network is relatively de minimis" as well, he added.

— Today is the day the routers happened to go down in North Korea for reasons unrelated to any attack or other reason. "It could be even that there were power gird problems," said Cowie.

There was no immediate response from the State Department or White House to questions about whether the outage was a result of the "proportionate response" President Barack Obama promised last week to the crippling cyberattack on Sony, which U.S. officials say was orchestrated by Pyongyang.

[Razgovory]

A tree probably came down on their lines.