North Korean Internet Attacked, White House Won’t Comment

DDoS Attack Suspected as Entire Nation's Internet Goes Down

North Korean internet connections began experiencing trouble Friday, and it got progressively worse over 24 hours, until finally every single IP address in the nation went down, effectively cutting the nation’s already limited addresses from the Internet entirely. They were down for part of the afternoon, but were up again by Monday evening.

North Korea isn’t talking, but experts say what happened is consistent with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, except on a nationwide scale.

That their Internet began experiencing problems at the same time as the US began threatening them is immediately suspect, and the White House is officially refusing to comment on the incident.

If confirmed as a US attack, it would be the first time the US has knocked another nation entirely off the Internet through hostile action, though given how small North Korea’s Internet presence is, it isn’t a huge feat.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.