North Korea faced an internet shutdown, and experts suspect cyber-attacks are the main reason. The internet outage remained for six hours in the country on Wednesday last week during local morning time. It is the second incident causing internet outages in North Korea in the past two weeks. Cybersecurity expert Junaid Ali from Britain says the recent outage may be due to a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
If a user in North Korea tried to connect to an IP address, the internet could not route the data into the country. The servers were back to normal within a few hours after the DDoS attack. Individual servers, however, could not function normally because of the disruption, these servers include-Naenara, the North Korean government official portal, Air Koryo Airlines, and the North Korea Ministry of Affairs.
News website NK Pro reports network records and log files suggest that websites hosted in North Korean domains that end with ".kp" could not be accessed. A similar incident happened in North Korea earlier on January 24, 2022. In simple terms, network disturbance, not power cut, caused the internet outage. Experts observed that no internet traffic went in and out of North Korea during the attack.
According to Junaid ", it is common for one server to go offline for some periods, but these incidents have seen all web properties go offline concurrently. It is not common to see their entire internet dropped offline.
During the incidents, operational degradation would build up first with network timeouts, then individual servers going offline and then their key routers dropping off the internet." Internet access is restricted in North Korea, we don't know how many people have direct access to it, but the data suggests that around 25 million people have access to the internet, which is only 1% of the total population.
