North Korea cyber-attacks a hacker, he shuts down their whole internet

A hacker in the US has taken credit for the ongoing internet disruption in North Korea. He states that he is performing "denial-of-service” attacks on the country to get back at the regime for targeting him in cyber-attacks a year earlier.

Digital connectivity in North Korea recently took a hit as the country was seen suffering from repeated outages of its few websites. The experts have been trying to figure out the reason behind this for the past two weeks. While fingers were being pointed at state-sponsored attacks on the isolated country following its recent missile testing, it turns out, it was an individual hacker sitting at his home in the US who took down North Korea's internet connectivity single-handedly.

The story is that of pure revenge, against a previous cyber-attack from North Korea that our protagonist here was the victim of. At the time, a hacking campaign by North Korea had targeted Western security researchers in an attempt to steal their hacking tools and find chinks in their cybersecurity protocols. Among the many targeted, one American took this attack personally and wanted to get back at North Korea's attempts.

Identified as P4x in a recent report by Wired, the American hacker waited for a year to see if the US government responded to North Korea's strike. Seeing that there was no retaliation, P4x decided to revert to the attacks by himself. "If they don’t see we have teeth, it’s just going to keep coming,” the hacker told Wired.

To get back at North Korea's hacker group, P4x then launched “denial-of-service” attacks on the servers and routers of North Korea's networks. He had found numerous "known but unpatched vulnerabilities" in the systems that allowed him to launch these attacks. Since then, P4x has managed to automate these attacks on the country's networks. Now he just periodically checks the functioning of his programs meant to disrupt the internet of North Korea, right at his home.

“It's pretty interesting how easy it was to actually have some effect in there,” he told Wired.

P4x's attacks on North Korea proved effective, as experts noticed almost all the websites within the country go down at several points during the attack. The hacker thus achieved his intention of getting back at the North Korean regime. However, others point out that the hackers behind the original attack on P4x may not even be in the country at any point.

P4x acknowledges this and says that his intention is never to target the country or its citizens itself, but to annoy the North Korean regime with these attempts. Since most of the people in North Korea do not have access to the internet, the crashing websites will certainly have had an impact on the ruling power in North Korea.