North Korea: North Koreas tiny corner of the global Internet was knocked offline Monday as U.S. officials hinted about secret responses to Pyongyangs cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, but the temporary outage was likely the result of an attack by hackers rather than any strike by another country. Dan Holden, a director at network defense firm Arbor Networks, which tracks Internet attacks around the world, says all the technical evidence shows that the North Korean outage was more likely a denial of service attack - an intentional network traffic jam orchestrated by hackers. Much like a real-world strike from the U.S., you probably wouldnt know about it until it was too late. This is not the modus operandi of any government work, he wrote in a blog post. Late Monday, however, Dyn Research, which monitors global Internet connectivity, tweeted that service was back up in North Korea, after about a 10-hour outage. Holden said it was unclear whether North Korea had been knocked offline or had unplugged itself as a defensive measure - but either way, the denial of service attack was responsible. It certainly would not be difficult, he said. Arbor said it began observing denial of service attacks targeting the approximately 1,000 North Korean Internet addresses on Thursday. Media reports circulated connecting the reclusive Stalinist regime to the massive Nov. 24 hack that crippled Sony Pictures Entertainment, supposedly in retaliation for the Seth Rogen comedy The Interview. The outage spurred speculation that it might be part of the proportionate response that President Barack Obama promised over the weekend - and U.S. officials did little to tamp it down. We arent 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, said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf in response to questions about the North Korean outage. So I cant confirm those reports, but in general, thats what the president has spoken to. White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel declined to comment on the outage, but said the administration wants to send a deterrence message to North Korea and ... and others that might be tempted to follow the same path. This meant that at least part of the response would probably need to be public, he said, or if not public, at least knowable to the North Koreans. But much would remain covert, he said. We also may want to be able to just diminish their capacity to carry out these kind of attacks in the future, in which case we may not want them to know everything that we have done to do that, Daniel said. Attacks peaked over the weekend according to Arbors data, drawn from nearly 300 Internet service providers that share anonymized traffic data with the Burlington, Mass.-based company. Around noon Eastern Time on Monday, the North Korean IP range went out, and did not come back up, said Jim Cowie, chief scientist of Dyn Research, which monitors global Internet connectivity. About a day of intermittent connectivity preceded the shutdown, according to Dyn Research and other companies observations. Almost the entirety of the very small North Korean Internet of approximately a thousand Internet protocol addresses is routed through the Chinese state-owned Internet service provider Chinese Unicom, Cowie said. That presents a very small attack surface for anybody who wants to take it out, he added. Hackers known as the Lizard Squad, who have a history of launching sophisticated denial of service attacks - including against the Sony PlayStation network - took credit. North Korea #offline reads a Tweet from @LizardUnit posted Monday afternoon. Xbox Live and other targets have way more capacity. North Korea is a piece of cake, the account said shortly afterward. In an interview with POLITICO, Holden also noted that the attack accomplished little, if the goal is disruption, since Internet connectivity with the outside world hardly pervades North Korean society. But experts say when that Obama described the North Korean attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment as a very expensive act of cyber vandalism rather than an act of war, he laid out important limits on the response. Cyber scholars dont agree on what precisely an act of cyber war would look like, but the general consensus is that if it were aimed at a private company rather than the U.S. government, the effects must be catastrophic - dead bodies, massive financial ruin or an attack targeting critical infrastructure such as energy grids and water lines. Hacking a movie studio - no matter how devastatingly effective - doesnt make the cut. That means the proportionate response Obama promised is extremely unlikely to include a conventional military strike. Theres no military option on the table. ... The Sony hack doesnt meet that threshold, said James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The response might include a cyber counterattack, but if and when Obama were to order such a strike, it would likely be carried out by intelligence agencies - whose operations are less legally restricted - rather than by uniformed military, former national security officials say hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/site/index.php?pageid=event_desc&edis_id=UEV-20141223-46413-PRK
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 23:27:12 +0000
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