According to the news of Wired, an American hacker claims that he took over the North Korean internet alone last month. Observers reported obvious outages in North Korea’s internet a few weeks ago. All of the country’s already only a few dozen or so websites appeared to be down.
The cuts came just after North Korea conducted a series of missile tests. This coincidence has some experts wondering if the outages were caused by cyberattacks from a foreign country.
The mysterious hacker, who identifies as P4x, says he attacked North Korea last year in retaliation for a North Korean hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers, including himself. He says the North Koreans tried to steal hacking tools and vulnerability information, but got nothing of value from it.
P4x says it has found numerous known but unpatched bugs in North Korean systems that allow the country to launch denial-of-service attacks on servers and routers to which several internet-connected networks are connected. He declined to explain these errors, but gave an example of a known vulnerability that could be used to take servers offline.
Experts say very few North Koreans have access to internet-connected systems, and many of the sites affected by the recent outages are used largely for government propaganda.
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