North Korea’s Internet Back Online After Successive Blackouts

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 (UPI) — Internet service in North Korea was restored, if limited, Tuesday after a nearly 10-hour blackout across the country.

The four Internet networks serving North Korea, each of which originates in China, were back on by Tuesday morning, local time, with two state-run websites available. The disruption came days after U.S. President Barack Obama promised an unspecified retaliation for North Korea’s involvement in hacking U.S. company Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Internet coverage remained spotty in North Korea Tuesday, and no reason for the disturbance was announced by any of those involved. The North Korean government offered no comment.

“It’s as if North Korea got erased from the global map of the Internet,” Matthew Prince of CloudFlare, a California-based computer security firm, told CNN. “If it is an attack, it’s highly unlikely it’s the United States. More likely it’s a 15-year-old in a Guy Fawkes mask.”

North Korea’s relatively small Internet presence makes it relatively easy to blanket the country with a denial of service, Jose Nazario of Virginia’s Invincea, Inc., security software company, said.

“It’s actually pretty easy,” he told Bloomberg News. “There are only a handful of hosts. It’s relatively easy to attack just those hosts or the pipes that are present there. There’s not that much bandwidth there. It’s very, very accessible to anyone who wanted to attack them.”

The U.S. State Dept. offered no answers to the mystery.

“We aren’t going to discuss… publicly, operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way, except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen,” spokeswoman Marie Harf said Monday.