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Days after the U.S. formally accused North Korea of masterminding the Sony cyber attacks, North Korea went dark, or at least darker than normal, given that few within the country could have noticed that it had gone completely offline. At the time, North Korea blamed the United States for the outage, but now two officials speaking to the Associated Press say that the American government was not responsible.
One of the officials furthermore told the AP that this disclosure was intended to demonstrate how seriously the administration considers offensive cyberattacks, which are to be used only in the most serious cases.
Until now, the Obama administration has neither confirmed nor denied U.S. involvement in the hack, which took down North Korean internet for about 10 hours during the weekend of December 20. However, it hinted that the internet outage was not an American operation when White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that sanctions were “the first aspect of our response.”
This “first aspect” came some 11 days after the North Korean internet outage.
AP reports that even within the administration, it remains unclear whether foreign governments or non-state actors such as rogue hackers were the cause of the outage. Since all North Korean internet networks rely on a single ISP, the China United Network Communications Group Co. Ltd., they were never considered particularly “robust.”
“It looks more like the result of an infrastructure attack than an infrastructure failure,” James Cowie, chief scientist at Dynamic Network Services Inc. of Manchester, New Hampshire, told the AP. “There’s nothing you can point to that says it has all the hallmarks of an attack by a nation state. It could have been anybody.”
(AP)
