[bdjackass318]

Ha ha ha this story is kind of funny. The picture is hilarious. Story:



Internet connectivity between North Korea and the outside world, though never robust to begin with, is currently suffering one of its worst outages in recent memory, suggesting that the country may be enduring a mass cyber attack a few days after President Obama warned the US would launch a "proportional response" to North Korea's hack against Sony.

"I haven't seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before," said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at the cybsecurity firm Dyn Research, according to Martyn Williams of the excellent blog North Korea Tech. Madory explained, "Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn't be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently."

While it's entirely possible that this is due to run-of-the-mill maintenance or technical issues, it's hard to miss that the outage comes just days after President Obama condemned North Korea as responsible for the massive cyberattack against Sony and pledged a "proportional" US response.

The outage also comes as China is investigating the accusations against North Korea over the Sony hack. North Korea's internet access is wired through China, which gives China more or less direct control over North Korea's access to the outside world.

Yes, North Korea does have the internet. Very few citizens have access to it, it's slow, and the connection is shaky. But it allows North Korea's state media, its propagandists, and its vaunted cyberwarfare divisions a way to access the outside world, as well as ways for sympathetic Koreans in South Korea and Japan to link up with the Hermit Kingdom. The country is wired through China, North Korea's northern neighbor and sole ally.

Why could this be happening? Did the US launch a cyber attack against North Korea in retaliation for the Sony hack? On the one hand, the White House has reportedly ruled out any sort of "demonstration strike" cyber reprisal against North Korean internet targets. On the other, that does not necessarily rule out a possible American effort to simply disrupt or sever North Korea's connection to the outside internet, if only to block future attacks.

It's also possible that China is attempting to shut down North Korea's internet connections with the outside world, perhaps so as to avoid future North Korean attacks that would embarrass China. While China is North Korea's patron, it also typically seeks to tamp down the Hermit Kingdom's provocations, which Beijing rightly sees as bad for Chinese interests.

Vigilante hackers could also theoretically be responsible, perhaps in an attempt to punish North Korea for the Sony attack, although past efforts by groups such as Anonymous have been spectacular failures.

While it's possible that North Korea is preemptively closing off its own internet access, hoping to prevent or preempt any US reprisal attacks, that would not explain why connectivity occasionally pops back up, suggesting that either an outage or a deliberate attack is the cause.

Source: http://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/743387...-internet-down

[niknik]

Would be cool if it was vigilantes. Maybe Anonymous tried again.

Got to be careful with Vox though. They're kinda like Gotnews.com, not always correct.

[thckoitin]

Couldn't that be done with one nail scissors?

[kellyhound]

President Obama himself weighed in on the issue. “We’ve got no indication that North Korea was acting in conjunction with another country,” he said in response to a question at his end-of-year press conference Friday.

So did the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the North calls itself, pull off the audacious attacks on its own?

The evidence suggests Beijing had to have been aware of North Korea’s hacking of Sony as soon as it began and was undoubtedly complicit in that crime.

Why? An intelligence official, speaking anonymously to Fox News this week, stated the “final stage of the attack” was launched outside North Korea. Ars Technica reports that the attacks originated from Chinese IP addresses.

Nonetheless, there is, at least in open sources at this time, insufficient information to make definitive conclusions about China as the origin of the hacking. Yet the preponderance of evidence indicates the hackers launched their raid from Chinese soil.

As David Sanger of the New York Times stated on Wednesday in an article discussing what American officials knew about the incident, “Much of North Korea’s hacking is done from China.”

In line with Sanger’s statement, there has been increasing speculation that North Korea’s Unit 121, a cell of elite hackers, was the organization that mauled Sony. The group is known to be responsible for at least some of the 2013 attacks on South Korean businesses. The code used in those attacks resembles the code employed in the Sony assault.

The shadowy Unit 121 has its headquarters in Pyongyang, but it reportedly operates mainly from outside the country, particularly from cities near the North Korean border in China, including the Chilbosan Hotel in the city of Shenyang. Most North Korean cyberwarriors, whether directly employed by the regime or freelancing, work from China because North Korea does not have the technical infrastructure to support extensive hacking operations.

Yet we do not need to speculate on the origin of the Sony attacks to find China complicit in the crime. After all, the attacks were routed through Chinese IP addresses. It is true that, in an apparent attempt to mask their origin, the attacks were also passed through, among other places, a Singapore convention center, Thailand’s Thammasat University, and a computer in Bolivia. No one is accusing the governments of Singapore, Thailand, or Bolivia of being behind the assaults.

The use of Chinese servers indicts Beijing, however. China maintains the “Great Firewall,” what many consider the world’s most comprehensive and sophisticated set of Internet controls. Chinese authorities can detect a single-line message sent from a computer or phone anywhere inside the People’s Republic. Therefore, these authorities knew or should have known about both the North Korean attacks passing out through the Firewall and the inbound data stolen from Sony, more than 100 terabytes worth.

Indeed, almost all the North’s telecommunications run through Chinese networks, which means all or virtually all of its Internet connections pass through China. Therefore, North Korea’s hacking, spanning decades, is well known to Beijing.


There is one other indication that North Korea was not working alone. Fox News on Friday reported that a U.S. investigation shows North Korea had help on the assault on Sony. As Fox notes, malware “modules or packets” targeting the company revealed a degree of complexity North Korea was not known to possess. As one intelligence official, speaking without attribution, said to the New York Times, “This was of a sophistication that a year ago we would have said was beyond the North’s capabilities.”

In addition to China, Iran and Russia also have the technology that North Korea used, but China, more than the two others, “supplies much of the manpower and technology North Korea uses to conduct cyberattacks.”

[rob666]

So there it is, everything is routed through china....... And china is also well known for hacking.
And yet, china gets a free pass again

[Morbid75]

I imagine Sony has enough cash to pay some hackers for hire. Probably some of them are 13 and living in mom's basement.

[Oswald2001]

Originally Posted by rob666 ↗

So there it is, everything is routed through china....... And china is also well known for hacking.
And yet, china gets a free pass again

It's all C-H-I-N-A.

It always has been.

[hal0mega]

Some entertainment while the world goes the down the shitter.

[Xfactor]

All this is bullshit. Cyber Attack with a country that's has no computers.

[Mr Poo]

CIA.