North Korea’s had a bit of a problem with its internet in recent weeks. The problem? Well, the internet keeps going down — for the whole country.
Now, a hacker in the United States is claiming responsibility, saying he did it to get revenge.
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North Korean news is always a bit surreal.
The Hermit Kingdom stands alone in its commitment to keeping its citizens in line and heavily restricting travel into or out of the country.
This often makes it difficult to get reliable information out of North Korea.
North Korean internet has gone down at least twice in recent weeks.
The internet in North Korea is an interesting entity in itself, as it’s heavily censored and for the most part, only officially-sanctioned state-run websites are accessible.
Observers think it’s a DDoS attack.
Distributed denial of service, or DDoS attacks are the result of hackers flooding the bandwidth of a system, overloading it and causing it to crash.
As Insider reported, that appears to be the case in North Korea. There’s even speculation that a western power might be behind the attacks, as they occurred during illegal weapons testing in North Korea.
However, a lone hacker says he’s responsible.
Since he’s a hacker, we have no idea what his real name is. But the hacker, who goes by P4x, has reached out , according to Wired, saying that he caused the outages, and he did it for revenge.
Revenge?
Last year, North Korean spies carried out a cyberattack that targeted security researchers in the United States. As P4x explains, he was one of those targeted by this attack.
The attacks angered him.
While P4x says he didn’t lose any valuable information or tools to the attack, it still filled him with a feeling of anger.
“I felt like [my cyberattack] was the right thing to do here,” he told Wired. “If they don’t see we have teeth, it’s just going to keep coming.”
“I want them to understand that if you come at us, it means some of your infrastructure is going down for awhile.”
P4x is clearly a hacker to likes to fight fire with fire. As for whether he actually did everything he’s claiming, Wired said he provided them with screengrabs showing proof.
The attack was automated.
P4x is eager to claim credit for North Korea’s internet outage, but doesn’t want to tip his hand too much. Aside from explaining that he automated most of the attack, he isn’t going into detail about the vulnerabilities in North Korean internet infrastructure that allowed him to gain access.
He’s looking to add to his team.
While P4x has been somewhat cagey regarding how his attack was carried out, he’s put word out that he’s looking for more hacktivists. It’s all part of his plan to carry out something called the FUNK project. That, unsurprisingly, stands for “F-U North Korea.”
The FUNK website, which is on the dark web, states, “You can make a difference as one person. The goal is to perform proportional attacks and information-gathering in order to keep North Korea from hacking the western world completely unchecked.”
What do you think?
It’s an example of high stakes quid pro quo in the digital world: if hackers feel threatened or targeted, they’ll lash out at the entity they feel is responsible.
Let us know what you think of this story in the comments.
