According to a report from Reuters, North Korea’s internet is about to be hit by a second wave of outages in as many weeks. Researchers said that this trouble is possibly caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The latest incident was on Wednesday morning local time, and came a day after North Korea conducted its fifth missile test this month.
Junade Ali, a British cybersecurity researcher who monitors a range of different North Korean web and email servers, noted that at the height of the apparent attack, all traffic to and from North Korea was taken down. He also added:
“When someone would try to connect to an IP address in North Korea, the internet would literally be unable to route their data into the country.”
A few hours later, servers that handle email were accessible, but some individual web servers of institutions such as the North Korea’s ministry of foreign affairs , Air Koryo airline and Naenara, the official portal for the North Korean government, still experienced stress and downtime.
“It’s common for one server to go offline for some periods of time, but these incidents have seen all web properties go offline concurrently. It isn’t common to see their entire internet dropped offline.”
Ali concluded that in the course of the incidents, operational degradation would build up first with network timeouts, then individual servers going offline and then their key routers dropping off the internet.