25 March 2015

Did Vigilantes Knock North Korea Offline?


U.S. cyberspies swear they didn’t take down the Hermit Kingdom’s Internet after the Sony hack. And those spies weren’t the only ones rooting around Pyongyang’s servers.

A variety of hackers—some working for the United States government, others operating independently—attacked and probed key portions of the North Korean Internet after the targeting of Sony Pictures Entertainment last year. Some of these hackers, including U.S. government employees, were acting in retaliation for the Sony attack; others, The Daily Beast has learned, were apparently driven by sheer curiosity about how the Hermit Kingdom’s fragile computer networks are connected to the outside world. And some of those independent actors claim that they are the ones who took North Korea offline.

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