Sony Pictures / Reuters
North Korea was hit by a total internet meltdown just days after the US accused the secretive Communist state of hacking Sony Pictures.
President Obama said on Friday he would launch a ‘proportionate response’ to North Korea’s devastating cyber-attack.
And today North Korea’s internet connection went dark after suffering intermittent problems on Sunday.
Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at US firm Dyn Research - which revealed the outage - said it was unlike anything he had seen before.
He said: “The situation now is they are totally offline. I don’t know that someone is launching a cyber attack against North Korea, but this isn’t normal for them.
“Usually they are up solid. It is kind of out of the ordinary. This is not like anything I’ve seen before.”
The country has four official networks connecting users to the Internet - all of which are routed through China.
The blackout came the day after North Korea threatened to blow up The White House after accusing the Obama administration of being behind Sony film The Interview - a fantasy about killing their leader Kim Jong Un.
President Obama had threatened to retaliate over claims that North Korea had attacked Sony that caused The Interview to be pulled.
The White House yesterday denied any involvement in the Internet meltdown.
National Security spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said: “We have no new information regarding North Korea today.
“If in fact North Korea’s Internet has gone down, we’d refer you to that government for comment.”
Sony pulled the planned Christmas Day release of The Interview last week after hackers threatened a 9/11-like attack on cinemas that screened the comedy.
On Friday, the FBI announced North Korea was “responsible” for the attack and President Obama vowed that the U.S. would respond to the cyber attack.
The President said: “They caused a lot of damage. We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose.”
The US is reviewing plans to put North Korea back on its list of state sponsors of terrorism after the country’s National Defence Commission warned that its 1.2 million-member army was ready to use all types of warfare against the US.
A statement said: “Our toughest counter-action will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole US mainland, the cesspool of terrorism.
North Korea and the US, which fought each other in the 1950-53 Korean War, remain technically in a state of war because the conflict ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
The US stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea to deter aggression from the North.
The rivals are locked in an international stand-off over the North’s nuclear and missile programmes and its alleged human rights abuses.
Last night, the UN Security Council said it would put the issue of North Kroea’s human rights record on its agenda for a meeting next week.
Mirror UK
Mirror UK
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