NORTH Korea suffered a series of mysterious internet outages recently and an American hacker is now claiming responsibility.
The hacker, only known as “P4X”, is a self-described cyber vigilante who said he’s targeting North Korea after being targeted by one of their own hackers.
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According to a recent article from Wired, the American hacker thinks he was personally targeted by a “government-backed entity based in North Korea”.
That hacking campaign was picked up by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG).
It’s thought the North Korean hackers may have been trying to steal research and tools from the US.
PX4 says he was contacted by the FBI after he got hacked.
He wasn’t happy with the government’s response and says he needed to take matters into his own hands.
He claims to have exploited vulnerabilities in North Korea’s online systems and launched a “denial of service” attack on important servers and routers.
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An attack like this would be enough to take the country’s hole internet offline and it was said to take all of North Korea’s websites off the internet.
That blackout period lasted approximately six hours.
It all happened last week before PX4 decided to speak out.
Wired says its viewed data from PX4 and believes his claims.
The news outlet said: “Records from the uptime-measuring service Pingdom show that at several points during P4x’s hacking, almost every North Korean website was down.
“(Some of those that stayed up, like the news site Uriminzokkiri.com, are based outside the country.)
“Junade Ali, a cybersecurity researcher who monitors the North Korean internet, says he began to observe what appeared to be mysterious, mass-scale attacks on the country’s internet starting two weeks ago and has since closely tracked the attacks without having any idea who was carrying them out.”
A lot of people in North Korea don’t have access to the internet so it’s likely a large majority int he country didn’t know about the outage.
PX4 said he wanted to affect the people as little as possible but send a message to the North Korean government.
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