By Brenda Goh
SEOUL, Oct 23 (Reuters) – A cyberattack likely caused intermittent internet outages in North Korea that took down several of the reclusive country’s state-managed websites this week, analysis by US network monitoring company Kentik found.
North Korea’s internet experienced multiple waves of traffic from places such as Vietnam and the Philippines, at the same time as several North Korean websites began experiencing outages over a 32-hour period that began on Tuesday, Doug Madory, Kentik’s director of internet analysis, told Reuters on Friday.
“This traffic all started at the same time and it is coming from Vietnam and Venezuela. That’s definitely a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service ) attack,” he said.
Kentik’s data showed that the sharp spikes in traffic began at around 11 a.m. local time (0201 GMT) on Tuesday. However, the data does not indicate who the perpetrators are and Kentik only analysed a portion of the traffic directed at North Korea, Madory said.
The outages hit more than 40 official sites using the country’s .kp domain, including those of the foreign ministry and state news agency KCNA, according to South Korean media.
South Korean media had also cited security experts as saying that North Korea’s unstable power supplies could have been a cause. The outage appeared unrelated to global internet issues stemming from the disclosure of vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language later in the week.
North Korea’s tightly controlled internet network has been paralysed before. In late 2014, following controversies over a Sony Pictures comedy about a fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, North Korea experienced an hours-long complete internet outage.
(Reporting by Brenda Goh; editing by Lincoln Feast.)
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