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An American hacker reportedly took down the entirety of North Korea’s internet as a form of revenge while ‘in his pyjamas’ for a cyber-attack against him perpetrated by Pyongyang.
It’s a strange one, but it seems as if the hacker – identified only as P4x – launched a number of ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS, if you’re in the know) attacks on the small hermit nation, which brought the whole country’s online world to a standstill.
Emails ground to a halt and the websites of the government also stopped working.
Basically, a DDoS completely saturates a system with fake traffic, which takes up all of the available bandwidth, which in turn limits the processing capacity of the website’s servers and the site itself grinds to a halt.
Because of the rules in North Korea, not everyone is allowed to use the internet, only a number of high-ranking officials and academics.
Furthermore, there aren’t that many North Korean websites that are available on the wider internet that we’d be familiar with.
Just a couple of the sites available on the internet at large are Air Koryo, the state airline, and Naenara, which is a site run by the North Korean government.
So, over the past few weeks the websites have been under sustained attack from P4x, who even had the powers that be in Pyongyang thinking that the country was being attacked by a Western power.
The experts had believed that the attacks could have been linked to the recent missile tests carried out by the North Korean military, which has caused a lot of concern in the region.
However – according to Wired Magazine – it wasn’t some shady arm of another state acting, but ‘one American man in a T-shirt, pyjama pants and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks'.
In the magazine, they said that the hacker was ‘periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.’
P4x told Wired: “It felt like the right thing to do here. If they don't see we have teeth, it's just going to keep coming,
“I want them to understand that if you come at us, it means some of your infrastructure is going down for a while.”
He claims that this is the revenge for an attack that North Korea made on his personal network a year ago in an attempt to get his hacking technology.
Whilst he reported the attack to then FBI, nothing was done.
So – in his own words – he thought ‘if no-one is going to help me, I’m going to help myself’.
He certainly seems to have done that.
Topics: World News, Weird, Technology
