Garden-variety DDoS attack knocks North Korea off the Internet

The simplest explanation for North Korea’s suddenly dropping off the Internet was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that overwhelmed the isolated nation’s tenuous connection to the rest of the world, experts said Monday.

North Korea’s Internet connection went down around 11 a.m. ET Monday, and was restored about nine and a half hours later, at approximately 8:45 p.m. ET. But within hours, some sites checked by Computerworld, including North Korea’s official news agency, were again offline.

Reuters

A DDoS attack could have been launched by a small group or even an individual, the researchers said. “If it turns out it was an attack, I’d be far more surprised if it was a government launching the attack than I would if it was a kid in a Guy Fawkes mask,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of security firm CloudFlare, in an email.

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