North Korea experienced a massive Internet outage Monday, and some researchers and web watchers speculated that the country's online connections could be under cyberattack.
The Internet outage comes less than a week after the U.S. vowed an unspecified response to a massive hacking attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment over the release of the comedy film "The Interview." The plot of the comedy centers on the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, leading to widespread speculation that the country was responsible for the attack. Late last week, the FBI publicly blamed North Korea in the incident, though Pyongyang has denied involvement.
The White House and the State Department on Monday declined to say whether the U.S. government had any role in North Korea's Internet problems.
"We have no new information to share regarding North Korea today," White House National Security Council spokesperson Bernadette Meehan told Fox News. "If in fact North Korea’s Internet has gone down, we’d refer you to that government for comment."
Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at New Hampshire-based Dyn Research, a company that studies Internet connectivity, said the problems were discovered over the weekend and grew progressively worse to the point that "North Korea's totally down."
"They have left the global Internet and they are gone until they come back," he said.
He said one benign explanation for the problem was that a router may have suffered a software glitch, though a cyberattack involving North Korea's Internet service was also a possibility.
Routing instabilities are not uncommon, but this particular outage had gone on for hours and was getting worse instead of better, Madory said.
"This doesn't fit that profile," of an ordinary routing problem, he said. "This shows something getting progressively worse over time."
President Obama said Friday that the U.S. government expected to respond "proportionately" to the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., which he described as an expensive act of "cyber vandalism" that he blamed on North Korea. Obama did not say how the U.S. might respond.
"We aren't going to discuss, you know, publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in anyway except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said last week.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1wXzf0x
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