The United States Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacker organization cannot be held responsible for North Korea’s frequent internet failures. Those programs were run by an American man who watched Alien movies and munched on spicy corn snacks in his living room night after night—and periodically walked over to his home office to keep track of the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt an entire country’s internet service.
Over a year ago, North Korean spies hacked an independent hacker known as P4x. Just over a year ago, the cybersecurity researcher, whose name has only been given as P4x by Wired magazine, was targeted by hackers in the DPRK in an attempt to gain access to undisclosed software flaws. He now says he has disrupted servers in DPRK in retaliation.
The hacker claimed he used unpatched vulnerabilities in North Korean servers to launch a series of DDoS attacks that knocked out sections or the entire DPRK’s IT infrastructure. P4x was one of the victims of a hacking campaign targeting Western security experts with the ostensible goal of obtaining access to their hacking tools and software flaw information. According to Wired, the hacker’s aim was to anger the North Korean dictatorship, but the attack accomplishes little more than putting the international community at risk.
According to Columbia University cyber warfare analyst Jenny Jun, if the DPRK believes the DDoS attack was directed by the US, it leaves plenty of room for misunderstanding and further retaliation against US interests. The DPRK may launch cyberattacks aimed at causing similar damage in response to US DDoS attacks, rather than reprising with DDoS attacks on US targets. According to P4x, his attacks on North Korean networks are highly automated, with scripts enumerating what systems are still online and then executing exploits to put them out of commission.
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