Another DOS attack hit the North Korean internet on Saturday just hours after the official news agency referred to President Obama as a “monkey.” In addition to the internet, the 3G wireless network was also disabled.
It’s the third time this week that North Korea has lost its internet connectivity.
ABC News reports:
North Korea faced a five-hour Internet outage Saturday, the country’s third major outage in the past week.
The Internet went out in the nation around 10:42 p.m. local time and remained down for five hours, according to Dyn Research, an Internet management performance company that measures global Internet traffic.
The network had previously gone down twice in the past week, with the first outage lasting for more than nine hours on Dec. 22, and the second lasting for just over 30 minutes on Dec. 23.
After the third outage today, North Korean officials released a statement insulting the president.
“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s Policy Department said in a statement carried by the country’s official Korean Central News Agency, according to The Associated Press.
In recent days some internet commentators have discussed the possibility over social media that another entity besides North Korea was actually behind the Sony hack. The FBI completely dismissed those theories in a statement today
“The FBI has concluded the Government of North Korea is responsible for the theft and destruction of data on the network of Sony Pictures Entertainment,” read a portion of the statement given to ABC News. “Attribution to North Korea is based on intelligence from the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community, DHS, foreign partners and the private sector. There is no credible information to indicate that any other individual is responsible for this cyber incident.”
It’s not the first time that the NoKo’s have insulted President Obama with crude, racist insults:
In May, its official news agency called Obama a “crossbreed” and “a wicked black monkey,” while referring to South Korean President Park Geun-hye as “an old prostitute.”
In August, it called Secretary of State John F. Kerry a wolf with a “hideous lantern jaw.”
Yeah, well…OK Kerry does have a lantern jaw and it’s a matter of opinion whether it’s “hideous” or not.
As for U.S. involvement, this is a pretty pathetic response to a terrorist attack — if North Korea is, indeed, behind the Sony hack. There is a growing consensus in the private tech field that North Korea couldn’t be behind the hack.
Some U.S. cyber experts say the evidence the FBI has presented to attempt to incriminate hackers working for the communist regime is not enough to pin the blame on Pyongyang.
“It’s clear to us, based on both forensic and other evidence we’ve collected, that unequivocally they are not responsible for orchestrating or initiating the attack on Sony,” said Sam Glines, who runs the cybersecurity company Norse.
The FBI has said that code in the malware used by a group called “Guardians of Peace” (GoP) in the attack on Sony is similar to code used by North Korea in other attacks.
But that code was leaked a long time ago, experts say. Any hacker anywhere in the world could have used it.
There is a group in the Kim regime that is responsible for cyber warfare, but independent IT security researcher Scott Borg doesn’t believe North Korea was capable of the Sony hack.
“It’s beyond the skill level that we have been able to observe,” he said.
What reasons would the U.S. government have for wrongly blaming North Korea for the hack? Tensions are already high on the Korean Peninsula, and raising them further would only be detrimental to our ally South Korea. Therefore, it makes sense to speculate that the FBI has other intelligence pointing them to the Kim regime as the culprit.
If the NoKos were behind the hack, and the U.S. is taking out their internet in response, it’s safe to assume this tit for tat hacking is only beginning.
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