North Korea seems to be experiencing Internet connectivity issues, and those issues could be due to a cyber attack.
Before you ask, yes, North Korea has the Internet, though most citizens don't have access to it. Since Saturday, North Korean Internet has been experiencing widespread connectivity problems, according to Dyn, an Internet performance company.
"We monitor online infrastructure," Adam Coughlin, Dyn's director of corporate communications, told The Huffington Post in a phone call Monday. "We are really able to monitor this sort of thing in real time."
And in monitoring the Internet across the world, Dyn found strange outages in North Korea.
"A benign explanation could be with the border routers," Doug Madory, Dyn's director of Internet analysis, told HuffPost. "Another explanation is that they're experiencing a DDOS attack" -- that is, a distributed denial-of-service attack, a common type of hack.
Here's a graph, created by Madory on Monday, showing the unstable networks in North Korea over the past few days:
![north korea internet]()
Generally, there isn't a lot of instability in North Korea. "This does not look like anything that we've seen before, in that there's a steady increase in instability until periods of time," Madory told HuffPost. "We see outages -- hundreds of them -- all around the world. If there's a technical glitch, it's suddenly down and then it gets fixed."
"This is one of our core data services," Madory went on. "We have around 400 live feeds of data coming in from all over the world. From that, we can say very confidently that North Korean routes are no longer on the global routing table. They are completely offline."
HuffPost spoke to Madory at about 2 p.m. EST on Monday. At that point, Madory said, North Korea had been offline for about three hours.
The outages come just days after White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that the U.S. needs to enact "a proportional response" to last month's cyber attack on Sony Pictures, for which an FBI investigation concluded last week that "the North Korean government is responsible."
Before you ask, yes, North Korea has the Internet, though most citizens don't have access to it. Since Saturday, North Korean Internet has been experiencing widespread connectivity problems, according to Dyn, an Internet performance company.
"We monitor online infrastructure," Adam Coughlin, Dyn's director of corporate communications, told The Huffington Post in a phone call Monday. "We are really able to monitor this sort of thing in real time."
And in monitoring the Internet across the world, Dyn found strange outages in North Korea.
"A benign explanation could be with the border routers," Doug Madory, Dyn's director of Internet analysis, told HuffPost. "Another explanation is that they're experiencing a DDOS attack" -- that is, a distributed denial-of-service attack, a common type of hack.
Here's a graph, created by Madory on Monday, showing the unstable networks in North Korea over the past few days:
Generally, there isn't a lot of instability in North Korea. "This does not look like anything that we've seen before, in that there's a steady increase in instability until periods of time," Madory told HuffPost. "We see outages -- hundreds of them -- all around the world. If there's a technical glitch, it's suddenly down and then it gets fixed."
"This is one of our core data services," Madory went on. "We have around 400 live feeds of data coming in from all over the world. From that, we can say very confidently that North Korean routes are no longer on the global routing table. They are completely offline."
HuffPost spoke to Madory at about 2 p.m. EST on Monday. At that point, Madory said, North Korea had been offline for about three hours.
The outages come just days after White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that the U.S. needs to enact "a proportional response" to last month's cyber attack on Sony Pictures, for which an FBI investigation concluded last week that "the North Korean government is responsible."