North Korea Internet totally down. Sabotage or technical issue?

Many other assumptions are circulating, including possible limitations caused by the Chinese infrastructure used by the North Korea to access the World Wide Internet. Some experts propend for a maintenance problem, others for an intentional operation run by the government of Beijing.

“Other possible explanations for North Korea’s internet outage could be 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.” reports a blog post published on The Telegraph.

Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s founder, defined the Internet access as “toast” in an email to The New York Times:

“CloudFlare, an Internet company based in San Francisco, confirmed Monday that North Korea’s Internet access was “toast.” A large number of connections had been withdrawn, “showing that the North Korean network has gone away,” Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s founder, wrote in an email.” 

The expert Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, explained that networks of North Korea were “under duress”, he also added that the outage is one of the worst he had seen before.

 “I wouldn’t be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently.” “I haven’t seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages before. Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems.” Madory told the North Korea Tech blog: “North Korea is totally down.”

In these days, experts at Arbor Networks observed several DDoS attacks targeting the national internet infrastructure, but the researchers excluded the involvement of the US government.

It is premature to speculate on what happened in the next few days we will know more.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  North Korea, Internet)