According to a recent wired report, a single hacker took down the majority of North Korea’s Internet. Following a lesser strike on January 14, North Korea News said that a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack took the “entire country” off the Internet on January 26. “It’s typical for one server to go down for a period of time, but in these events, all online properties went down at the same time,” said Junade Ali, a cybersecurity expert who monitors North Korean servers and websites for Reuters. “It’s not every day that their entire internet goes down.”
Given that the occurrences occurred shortly after North Korea’s nuclear testing, it’s logical to believe that the attack was a retaliation by regime opponents. One hacker, who has provided evidence to Wired, has claimed responsibility for the breach, telling the news organization that he carried it out while watching Aliens in his pajamas and eating spicy corn snacks from his home in the United States.
The hacker, who requested anonymity due to concerns about his safety and legal ramifications, claimed that he was hacked by spies as part of a campaign against western security researchers. Despite the fact that he survived the attack with his vital data intact, he was worried by the fact that he had been attacked by an entire nation and what he saw to be a lack of response from the US government. He decided to even the score a year later. He told Wired, “I want them to understand that if you come at us, it means some of your infrastructure is going to fall down for a while.”
P4x discovered previously unknown vulnerabilities and was able to exploit them to launch his own DDOS attacks on servers used by the North Korean network. One flaw causes some HTTP headers to be mishandled, allowing the hacker to execute software that overloads the server with requests. He was able to keep executing scripts on any servers that stayed online or began operating again after the initial attack, despite not revealing most of his exploits. All of this happened when I was watching Aliens.
According to Wired, the hacker now intends to break into North Korean systems in order to obtain information that would be beneficial to experts. He’s doing this by enlisting the help of other cybersecurity specialists for his initiative FUNK, which stands for “FU North Korea.”
