You just knew that someone, whether it was the United States government or an independent hacker collective such as Anonymous, would try to make North Korea pay for its role in getting Sony to cancel the theatrical release of The Interview. And now it appears that some sort of reprisal is underway — Re/code reports that analysts at DYN Research have determined that North Korea’s networks are under attack from an unknown source and are showing “signs of distress.”
FROM EARLIER: 9 more secrets we learned from the Sony hack
“In the last 24 hours or so, the networks in North Korea are under some kind of duress, but I can’t tell you exactly what’s causing it,” DYN researcher Doug Madory told Re/code. “There’s no way to confirm that these outages are the result of an attack, but given the timing, it’s something we have to consider.”
Last year, Anonymous had success in bringing down some North Korean websites as part of a campaign to get leader Kim Jong Un to step down. If DYN’s claims are correct, though, the current attack seems to be much larger than the comparatively small-scale operations run by Anonymous last year.
Of course, as Re/code points out, it’s not entirely clear how disruptive shutting down North Korea’s Internet service really is since the vast majority of the country doesn’t have access to it and it’s only used by high-ranking government officials.
