Well, that was fast.
Over the weekend, the United States threatened to shut down internet access for the whole of North Korea, after claiming that the recent Sony hack was a state-sponsored cyber attack by that country’s top officials.
As of right this very moment, Bloomberg are reporting that North Korea’s four official networks, which began experiencing intermittent outages yesterday, are now completely offline.
“I don’t know that someone is launching a cyber-attack against North Korea, but this isn’t normal for them,” said internet analyst Doug Madory. “Usually they are up solid. It is kind of out of the ordinary. This is not like anything I’ve seen before.”
The really interesting part of all this is that North Korea’s internet is routed through China. China and the United States have previously discussed the prospect of establishing “rules of the road” for acceptable internet behaviour.
It is speculated that the U.S. may have approached China to ask for cooperation in shutting North Korea’s internet down, and if this is indeed some kind of joint effort between the two countries, that would be pretty huge.
That’s to say nothing of the symbolic significance of cutting off internet access to an entire country, which is a pretty damn scary way of warding off future state-sponsored cyber attacks.
As mentioned in our previous post, internet access in North Korea is limited to an elite few, so most of the country’s citizens would not be aware of the current outage, or possibly what the hell the internet even is.
That said, those elite few have made threats of reprisals “a thousand times greater” than the recent Sony Pictures hack should the U.S. retaliate as they appear to have done.
As we speak, some terrified official in Pyongyang is probably holding an iPhone 3 up in an attempt to get a signal, and we await the country’s response.
