North Korea's Internet Is Totally Screwed Right Now

[SvenSvensonov]

North Korea's Internet Is Totally Screwed Right Now

Following several days of continuous connectivity problems, North Korea's internet has gone dark, according to one researcher. Whether it's a cyber attack or a routine outage remains unclear. However, it looks a lot like a DDoS attack.

News of the outage arrives just two days after the United States asked China to help in cripple North Korea's ability to mount cyber attacks, after the FBI blamed Kim Jong-Un's regime for hacking into Sony Pictures. This does not necessarily mean that North Korea itself has become victim to a cyber attack. The country experiences outages all the time, in part due to poor infrastructure. However, some experts think this string of instability is different.

''The situation now is they are totally offline," Doug Madory of Dyn Research told Bloomberg. "I don't know that someone is launching a cyber-attack against North Korea, but this isn't normal for them." Earlier, Madory had told North Korea Tech, "I haven't seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before. Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn't be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently."

One can't help but wonder if China or the U.S. might be involved. China, for one, recentlyannounced an investigation into North Korea's role in the Sony Pictures hack despite being a potential partner. North Korea, for its part, denies any role at all, though the country's posture became markedly more aggressive in the past couple of days. After proposing the U.S. help in a joint inquiry to prove it had nothing to do with the attacks, North Korea threatened to strike the White House and "the whole U.S. mainland, that cesspool of terrorism."

North Korea obviously isn't happy about being fingered as the villain in the attack on Sony Pictures. (A lot of smart people still don't think North Korea had anything to do with the hack.) Now, the country can be unhappy with its lack of internet access. [NYT, Bloomberg, North Korea Tech]

Update (2:40 p.m.): Madory later told The New York Times, "Their networks are under duress. This is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers." The paper's Nicole Perlroth explains the details:

North Korea does very little commercial or government business over the Internet. The country officially has 1,024 Internet protocol addresses, though the actual number may be somewhat higher. By comparison, the United States has billions of addresses.

North Korea's addresses are managed by Star Joint Venture, the state-run Internet provider, which routes many of those connections through China Unicom, China's state-owned telecommunications company.

By Monday morning, those addresses had gone dark for over an hour.

As a researcher from CloudFlare told the Times: North Korea's network is "toast."

From North Korea's Internet Is Totally Screwed Right Now

For a video on the impact this will have on North Korea and its citizens, see the video in the link below.

North Korea Internet: Did the U.S. Restrict Access?: Video - Bloomberg

 

[welcomeJason]

以上都是逗比
以上都是逗比
이상 다끌다
以上は逗比
以上都系斗过
专业水贴一百年，值得信赖
————————————————————
fifteen words fifteen words
fifteen words fifteen words
fifteen words fifteen words
fifteen words fifteen words
fifteen words fifteen words
fifteen words fifteen words

 

[Abu Zolfiqar]

"intranet" not internet

regular citizens there are banned access to the internet and the outside world

 

[F-22Raptor]

If this was the work of the NSA, well done.

 

[Selous]

What kind of a monster would deprive these simple and proud people of their intranet

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Well I guess that shows the U.S. Government can pull the plug if they want to.

 

[Oldman1]

It shouldn't be that hard to take down the only computer in North Korea. But we should thank China for making it possible. After all the U.S. asked for help and China responded.

 

[opruh]

Can the US government pull the plug of China too, guess not despite all the hacking.

 

[TaiShang]

WikiLeaks Releases Classified CIA Agents Tips onInfiltrating EU, Schengen

© Sputnik/ Iliya Pitalev
00:10 22.12.2014(updated 08:37 22.12.2014)


According to documents published by WikiLeaks the US Central Intelligence Agency has issued advice for its agents on how to infiltrate international passport control systems, including in the European Union and the Schengen area.

MOSCOW, December 22 (Sputnik) — The US Central Intelligence Agency has issued advice for its agents on how to infiltrate international passport control systems, including in the European Union and the Schengen area, according to two previously undisclosed documents published by WikiLeaks on Sunday.

“The European Union’s Schengen biometric-based border-management systems pose a minimal identity threat to US operational travellers because their primary focus is illegal immigration and criminal activities, not counter-intelligence,” reads one of the documents, dated January 2012.

The CIA advice booklet, entitled “Schengen Overview”, gives detailed information on customs procedures in Europe and threats they pose to agents using false documents. While biometric systems are currently not used for people with US documents, this could possibly change in 2015, increasing the “identity threat level”, according to the CIA.

The second document, dated September 21, 2011, gives advice on how to pass airports screenings across the world.

The manual, titled "Surviving Secondary", notes that airport watch lists may include names of confirmed or suspected intelligence agents and lists a number of signs that could disclose one’s identity, such as apparent nervousness and inability to speak the language of the passport-issuing country.

The document also lists special security procedures in a number of international airports and underlines that a “consistent, well-rehearsed, and plausible cover is important for avoiding secondary selection and critical for surviving it.”

According to the manual, accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn could help make the false identity more plausible.

In a highlighted box entitled “The Importance of Maintaining Cover––No Matter What”, the CIA describes a situation where an intelligence officer was selected for secondary screening in a EU country, possibly due to “overly casual dress inconsistent with being a diplomatic-passport”.

When the CIA officer’s bag screened positive for traces of explosives, he presented a cover story on having engaged in counter-terrorism training in Washington DC. Even though local security officials initially concluded that the agent had trained in a terrorist camp, he “consistently maintained” his cover story and was eventually allowed to proceed with his travels.

The publication of the two travel advice documents is the second release within theWikilLeak's so-called CIA Series, which is set to continue next year.


***

The Modus Operandi of Imperialist Propaganda
By Patrick Martin
Global Research, December 22, 2014

Coming soon to a theater near you, a US imperialist propaganda blockbuster, the latest production from CIA Pictures, made in participation with Pentagon Entertainment, and with the collaboration of American Media Partners: Cyberwar North Korea.

Such an announcement would have been useful last week, to alert American public opinion to the impending avalanche of entirely unsubstantiated assertions by US government officials, rebroadcast uncritically by the major newspapers and television networks. The target of the blitz was North Korea, blamed for the hacking attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, which led the studio to cancel the premiere of The Interview and withdraw the film from circulation.

Zero facts and evidence have been made public to support the claims of North Korean hacking. The isolated Stalinist regime was certainly hostile to the film, a comedy based on the premise that the CIA contracts two American journalists (played by James Franco and Seth Rogen), to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, after he agrees to be interviewed by them.

But Pyongyang has vociferously denied any role in the hacking attack on Sony, and proposed Saturday to join the US government in an investigation of the attack’s origins, declaring, “Whoever is going to frame our country for a crime should present concrete evidence.” This offer was quickly dismissed by Washington, which has presented no evidence whatsoever.

The FBI issued a statement Friday declaring that it had enough information to conclude that North Korea was responsible for the hacking attack, but it gave no details. President Obama pinned the blame on North Korea at his press conference later that day, but cited only the FBI statement.

Since then, the US media, with very few exceptions, has routinely described the event as “the first major, state-sponsored destructive computer-network attacks on American soil” (New York Times) and “North Korea’s cyberattack on Sony Pictures” (Wall Street Journal). North Korean responsibility for the Sony attack is reported by the television networks as unquestioned fact.

It has been left to the Christian Science Monitor to cite cautionary statements from security experts in Silicon Valley, to the effect that the presence of Korean-language code in the malware and the use of servers in China and Taiwan are not unusual for hackers, who grab bits of code from multiple sources, in many languages, and use vulnerable servers wherever they can be found.

“The speed at which US officials identified North Korean involvement in the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack surprised many experts familiar with the enormous challenges of pinpointing the origins of cyberattacks,” the online newspaper reported.

Pyongyang denounced the Sony film as a provocation commissioned by Washington for the purpose of destabilizing the North Korean government, a claim that, as the WSWS noted Saturday, is substantially true.

In a remarkable interview with the New York Times, given just before the film’s withdrawal from circulation, co-director Seth Rogen confirmed that he made the film in collaboration with the military-intelligence apparatus. “Throughout this process, we made relationships with certain people who work in the government as consultants, who I’m convinced are in the CIA,” Rogen said.

The North Korea-Sony affair is just the latest example of the type of provocation regularly employed by American imperialism to manipulate public opinion, either in support of US military and foreign policy, or, as appears likely in the current case, when the military-intelligence apparatus wishes to distract public attention from the exposure of its own crimes (last week’s report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on CIA torture).

Five months ago, the US government and the US media declared with one voice that the Russian government, or separatists armed by them, shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people. The claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin was the moral author of mass murder became the basis for a full-blast propaganda campaign. But the official investigation into the MH-17 disaster, conducted by the Netherlands, home of most of the victims, could produce no evidence of Russian involvement in shooting down the plane.

A year earlier, the US government and the US media waged a similar campaign against Syria, charging the government of President Bashar al-Assad with responsibility for an alleged nerve gas attack on US-backed “rebel” forces outside Damascus. The Obama administration declared that Assad had crossed a “red line” and ordered air strikes against Syria, only to pull back because of divisions among its allies, most notably in Britain, where parliament voted not to back such an attack. Months later, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh uncovered evidence that the gas attack was staged by the “rebels” themselves to provide a pretext for US intervention.

These methods go on from administration to administration: Clinton used alleged atrocities in Kosovo as the pretext for bombing Serbia in 1999; Bush used bogus claims of “weapons of mass destruction” and ties to Al Qaeda as the pretext for the invasion of Iraq in 2003; Obama cited impending massacres in Benghazi as the pretext for the US-NATO bombing of Libya in 2011 and a CIA-backed Islamist uprising that culminated in the murder of Muammar Gaddafi.

There is a definite modus operandi at work. In each of these campaigns, the American government counts on the American media as a willing and entirely uncritical partner, pumping out propaganda to delude the American population. The technique is to demonize the leaders of the target countries, with Kim Jong-un only the latest in a long line, from Slobodan Milosevic to Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad and Putin.

Certain conclusions can be drawn. No one should believe anything that comes out of Washington, a cesspool of official lying and provocation and the principal organizer of military violence all over the world. And no one should believe anything simply because the entire American media repeats it, as there is no media so shamelessly uncritical of official lies as in the United States.

 

[Oldman1]

Can the US government pull the plug of China too, guess not despite all the hacking.

Stealing information is one thing, which is something China is doing. But doing damage is another. If China decided to do something stupid like North Korea did, then of course the U.S. would retaliate.

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

Stealing information is one thing, which is something China is doing. But doing damage is another. If China decided to do something stupid like North Korea did, then of course the U.S. would retaliate.

Article from 2011:

BBC News - US Pentagon to treat cyber-attacks as 'acts of war'

 

[Oldman1]

Article from 2011:

BBC News - US Pentagon to treat cyber-attacks as 'acts of war'

"Cyber-attacks from foreign nations that threaten widespread US civilian casualties, like cutting off power supplies or shutting down emergency-responder networks, could be treated as an act of aggression under the new policy."

Indeed, just like whats happening in North Korea.

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

"Cyber-attacks from foreign nations that threaten widespread US civilian casualties, like cutting off power supplies or shutting down emergency-responder networks, could be treated as an act of aggression under the new policy."

Indeed, just like whats happening in North Korea.

China has no love for the Fat Kims, in fact they take every opportunity to go against us.

In fact I think we have some "sane" North Koreans who are up for the job instead.

Regime change is not our policy, but if they fall on their own, then all bets are off.

 

[Cossack25A1]

No more "internet fancy women videos" for Kim-jong Un for sometime after losing Internet connection.

 

[TaiShang]

China opposes cyber attack targeted at third nation: FM
By Global Times - Agencies Source:Global Times-Agencies Published: 2014-12-23

China on Monday stressed that it is opposed to all forms of cyber attacks and cyber terrorism, as well as any countries or individuals that launch cyber attacks on a third country from foreign soil, according to foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.

Hua made the remarks in a regular press briefing in response to the alleged hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which the US claims were launched by the North Korean government. The US has invited China to jointly investigate the attack.

Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi talked with US Secretary of State John Kerry over the phone on Sunday night, during which Wang made clear China's stance on the cyber attack issue, according to a foreign ministry statement.

Hua said China is prepared to be involved in constructive cooperation with the international community to safeguard peace and security in cyber space on the basis of mutual respect and trust.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) claimed Friday that what it called "enough information" had been found to conclude that North Korea was "responsible" for the attack.

The hackers said they were incensed by a Sony comedy, about a fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, which the studio has pulled.

North Korea has denied it was to blame.

Hua did not mention the US proposal for joint action. "Before making any conclusions there has to be sufficient factual evidence," she said, adding that China will handle it in accordance with relevant international and Chinese laws, and according to the facts.

US President Barack Obama and his advisers are weighing how to punish North Korea after the FBI concluded on Friday it was responsible for the attack on Sony.

North Korea's state news agency said it did not know who had hacked Sony Pictures.

"We do not know who or where they are but we can surely say that they are supporters and sympathizers with the DPRK," the KCNA news agency said.