San Francisco Internet Expert Says U.S. Not Likely Responsible For North Korea's Internet Shutdown
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) — North Korea's internet access is "toast" Monday, and there is speculation that it may be the result of U.S. action in response to the so-called Sony hack.
President Obama said last week that the U.S. would be responding to the attack that compromised personal information belonging to tens of thousands of Sony current and former employees. The hack and ensuing threats led Sony Entertainment to pull the plug on the movie release for "The Interview," a comedy about an assassination or North Korean leader Kim Jung-un.
At about 11 a.m. PST North Korea effectively dropped off the Internet which means that there was no traffic coming into or leaving the country.
There has been no confirmation from the White House that this was a U.S. action. But Matthew Prince, the founder of San Francisco-based CloudFare, said North Korean access to the Internet is "toast."
Prince said that distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, in which multiple compromised systems are used to crash a single system, is not that difficult to, especially since North Korea's connection though China only has the capacity for about 100 to 1000 home DSL connections.
"I think it's a little bit reckless for some of the speculation around whether the United States government is behind this. Frankly I would be more surprised—much, much, much surprised if this was the United States government as opposed to a teenager wearing a Guy Fawkes mask."
"We don't know yet how that happened it was an attack or what has happened in other oppressive regimes, such a Syria, where the government censors the internet for the entire country."
DDoS attacks, Prince also said are illegal.
"The United State would be treading on some challenging legal precedent if they had attacked the country in this—which again, is one more piece of evidence that it's highly unlikely that it's a state-sponsored attack," he said.
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