North Korea Internet Outage Related to Sony Hackers

22 Dec 2014 by Datacenters.com Technology

"It's been just days since the dispute between Sony Pictures and North Korea erupted over the (now canceled) release of the movie ""The Interview"". The controversial comedy featured a fictional assassination of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un which created an outrage with the N. Korean Government. In response to the movie, hackers who called themselves ""The Guardians of Peace"", rendered computers inoperable, released company information and finally forced Sony to take its entire network offline. Eventually, Sony decided to cancel the release of the movie to prevent further issues from arising. This move from Sony prompted an outrage from many U.S citizens as well as Barak Obama. President Obama vowed that the U.S would respond to N Korea in an ""appropriate"" and ""proportional"" way and urged North Korea to pay for the damage that was done to Sony Pictures.

COINCIDENCE, SECURITY BREACH OR CYBER WAR

Now in what is rumored to be potential patriotic retaliation N. Korea is experiencing an internet black out. ""I haven't seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before,"" said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at the cybsecurity firm Dyn Research. Madory explained, ""Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn't be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently."" This virtual black out in N. Korea has left many wondering is this just a coincidence or a product of a fueling cyber war?

Before jumping to conclusions that the U.S took matters of revenge into their own hands, let's look at the facts and determine what could have caused the internet outage. Reasons behind the failure could include a cut in a fiber-optic cable or a software meltdown on N. Korea's web routers. Since a cut in fiber-optic cable would have shown up in an immediate loss of connectivity and should be easy to pinpoint, this is much less likely the reason behind the failure. A software meltdown would have been publicly declared by either the US Government or North Korea in hopes to prevent controversial rumors to begin. Another option could be that China is attempting to shut down N. Korean internet connections to avoid future attacks that would embarrass them. Those are all possible options however, the most widely debated cause of this cyber black out is a Hack. Many believe that either the United States government or a group of ""Patriotic Hackers"" are to blame. Due to the timing, this seems like a likely source. Obama did promise that we would respond ""appropriately"", but whose definition of appropriate are we using? My definition of appropriate and your definition might differ slightly. As Americans, we often claim that we have a patriotic duty to protect our country when at war- so why can't that protection come in the form of the internet? With all of the domestic hacking that is done in the United States to one another- what would stop Hackers from defending our country from another country in the form of internet hacking?

The United States has proven in the past that we are capable of such cyber warfare if you look just a few years back at the Stuxnet incident. It's feasible to believe that we have access to the resources to do this again. If did hack into N.Koreans internet, what does this prove? If we can shut you down, we can monitor you as well. Never under estimate our power'¦ With that said, many are quoted saying that maybe Sony should just quickly release the movie ""The Interview"" and then we can all just pretend it never happened."

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Datacenters.com Technology

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